An American judge blocked the 10 billion dollar maxi order that the Pentagon had entrusted to Microsoft for the creation of iCloud services. The giant led by Jeff Bezos had resorted to denouncing political interference by the White House aimed at ousting Amazon from the game. The stop to the contract called Jedi (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) and which entrusted the maxi order of the Pentagon to Microsoft is temporary. The judges want to see it clearly after the lawsuit filed by Amazon that claims she was discriminated against for political reasons - I note the hatred between Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos who is also the owner of the Washington Post - and which asked the court to call a depose Trump himself, Defense Secretary Mark Esoer and his predecessor James Mattis. Microsoft and Amazon have long been "challenging" each other for dominance in the cloud sector. Europe, Cosera writes, is still irrelevant. Today our data, albeit parked on European servers, are accessible to US tech giants, who use them as they please. It is no coincidence that the new president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, confirmed at the Davos forum: "Europe's priority is digital sovereignty". The German government has built a cloud network (Gaia).
The mega $ 10 billion contract
With $ 10 billion, the Pentagon had relied on Microsoft for cloud computing services. A slap that the Trump administration had wanted to give to Amazon which, sure of the order, was already working on the project, had also bought premises and apartments near the Pentagon.
To win, the newspapers of the time headlined, the well-known hostility between Donald Trump and the king of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. Amazon controls 40% of e-commerce, selling 6 million items per second. AWS, the vision of web services, controls over half of the US cloud computing market: institutions, large companies such as Unilever and General Electric and even the CIA, entrust their data to Amazon servers. In 2013, the CIA decides to entrust its intelligence data to Amazon's cloud services: a $ 600 million contract. Since then, Amazon's lobbying spending in Washington has risen by 470 percent. In 2017 Bezos joined the Defense Department's advisory panel on technology. In the fall of the same year, the Pentagon announces the Jedi project, or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. Plan to migrate all Defense data to a centralized "cloud", so as to be able to use artificial intelligence more easily and communicate even from distant battlefields.
The Pentagon's Jedi project dates back to the days of the Obama administration. Last July Trump announced an internal investigation into the tender for the Jedi, saying he had received complaints from Amazon's competitors. In the end, Microsoft won the billionaire contract, which is growing strongly due to the strategy of its CEO, Satya Nadella, who three years ago, writes the Sole24Ore, bet on Azure, its cloud division (+ 36% growth for 11,6 , XNUMX billion) in the last quarterly just published, before the announcement of the Pentagon).