【Michael Maien】

For more than a year,Michael Maien some of the biggest tech companies in the U.S. have been competing for a $10 billion dollar cloud-computing contract with the U.S. Defense Department.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon announcedwho the two finalists for this extremely lucrative deal are: Amazon and Microsoft.

Tech giants have been seeking out the U.S. government contract for joint enterprise defense infrastructure, or JEDI, since it was first announced in 2017. It is considered to be “one of the largest federal information technology contracts in history” according to the New York Times.

Google was involved in the bidding for the JEDI contract, but had dropped outciting its “AI principles” in October. The search company had been in the midst of an employee pushback regarding its work with the Defense Department on an artificial intelligence project called Project Maven.

Companies like IBM and Oracle had also bid for the contract, but were ruled out as they did not fit the requirements necessary for the contract. Oracle, in particular, had been very competitive in trying to get the deal. The company tried to urge the government to split upthe contract between multiple bidders, however, the Pentagon was adamant about the $10 billion deal going to a single service provider.

Oracle also filed a lawsuitalleging that a current Amazon employee worked on JEDI during his time working at the Defense Department and had pushedthe contract in Amazon’s favor. The Pentagon says it investigatedthe allegation and found the former employee has no impact on the process.

The Pentagon says it will likely award the JEDI contract to either Microsoft or Amazon by mid-July.

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