Microsoft has been announced as the winner of a multi-billion dollar deal to supply cloud computing services to the Pentagon.
The US tech giant was awarded the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) contract after a fierce bidding war that saw the world's top technology firms pitted against each other.
This included a rival bid from Amazon Web Services drawing the ire of President Trump in his latest salvo against the company.
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JEDI mind tricks
The JEDI deal looks to give a significant upgrade to the computing capabilities at the US defence hub, giving it a huge update in terms of power and flexibility, as well as increased data handling.
Microsoft will now be charged with replacing a myriad of aging computer systems with a single Azure cloud platform that is able to cope with handling huge amounts of data on a daily basis.
In a statement, the company said it was "proud" to be the choice of the Department of Defence and "satisfy the urgent and critical needs of today's warfighters".
Amazon had previously thought to be the front-runner in the bidding process, but the company's bid to use AWS was reportedly shot down by President Trump, who has been a public critic of both the company and its CEO Jeff Bezos on a number of occasions.
The DoD stated that “All (offers) were treated fairly and evaluated consistently with the solicitation’s stated evaluation criteria, but Amazon now has ten days to decide if it wants to appeal, with an AWS spokesman saying it was “surprised about this conclusion.”
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