In an astounding about-face the DOD announced yesterday that it has decided to give a ten billion dollar contract commitment in technology design to Microsoft. The surprise announcement caught Amazon by surprise — inside sources at Amazon say that the company was so sure it would be awarded the Pentagon contract that it had already started to choose the personnel and set aside office space for the project. A cloud of controversy hangs over the decision since President Trump began criticising Jeff Bezos on Twitter. Bezos is the founder of Amazon, and has been highly critical of some of President Trump’s policies. Trump has tweeted several times about wanting to intervene in the DOD’s decision making process when it comes to awarding military contracts to big technology corporations.   

The contract is slated to be in effect for ten years, and is specifically targeted for the JEDI project, which will integrate DOD infrastructure with a classified set of algorithms meant to forestall any hacking group from breaching the Pentagon’s firewalls in case of a hostile takeover attempt. The cloud computing competition among companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Google, Oracle, and Amazon, for the DOD’s business has been extremely fierce and competitive in the past. But it now appears that Microsoft will continue to be the front runner in Defense technology contracts.