Pentagon Scraps JEDI in Win for Amazon at Microsoft’s Expense

WASHINGTON—Pentagon officials on Tuesday terminated the massive JEDI cloud-computing contract and said they would start fresh with a new project, capping a yearslong initiative that had become mired in litigation from Amazon.com Inc. and a barrage of objections from Congress.

In terminating the contract with Microsoft Corp. , Department of Defense officials focused largely on technical reasons, saying advances in cloud computing and the Pentagon’s own evolving needs had made the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure scheme obsolete.

“The evolving landscape is what has driven our thinking,” said John Sherman, the Pentagon’s acting chief information officer. “JEDI was the right approach at the time,” he added, but with changing circumstances “we’re in a different place.”

The decision will open up the new cloud project—rebranded as Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability—to all qualified bidders, Pentagon officials said. In addition to Microsoft and Amazon, officials said qualified bidders could include Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp.

Bidders are expected to be identified by about October, the officials said, with the new contract expected to be awarded in spring 2022. The new contract will run for no more than five years, the Pentagon said. Its value wasn’t immediately determined, although officials said it would be worth billions of dollars.