The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract is a large United States Department of Defensecloud computing contract which has been reported as being worth $10 billion. Companies interested in the contract included Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and REAN Cloud, part of Hitachi Data Systems. After protests from Google employees, Google decided to drop out of contention for the contract because of conflict with its corporate values. The deal was considered "gift-wrapped for Amazon" until Oracle contested the awarding of the contract to Amazon Web Services, citing the National Defense Authorization Act over IDIQ contracts and the conflicts of interest from Deap Ubhi, who worked for Amazon both before and after his time in the Department of Defense. This led Eric G. Bruggink, senior judge of the United States Court of Federal Claims, to place the contract award on hold. In August 2019, weeks before the winner was expected to be announced, President Donald Trump ordered the contract placed on hold again for Defense SecretaryMark Esper to investigate complaints of favoritism towards Amazon. In October 2019, it was announced that the contract was awarded to Microsoft. Media has noted Trump's dislike towards Amazon's founder, Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, a newspaper critical of Trump. According to Bezos, Trump "used his power to 'screw Amazon' out of the JEDI Contract". The JEDI contract was awarded to Microsoft on October 25, 2019, the DoD announced, but AWS filed documents with the Court of Federal Claims on 22 November 2019 challenging the award. A federal judge Patricia Campbell-Smith halted Microsoft's work on the project on February 13, 2020, a day before the system was scheduled to go live, awaiting a resolution in Amazon's suit. She said that Amazon's claims are reasonable and “is likely to succeed on the merits of its argument that the DOD improperly evaluated” Microsoft's offer. As a result, the DOD was forced by a federal judge to reopen bidding for the contract. In the wake of that reopening, Amazon has filed additional protests related to modifications which have been made to selected sections of the contract. Recent DOD legal filings have stated that the final award of the contract cannot take place until at least August 17, and may yet be delayed beyond that date as well.
