Last August, U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis made a journey to the West Coast and met with Google founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai. Over a half day of meetings, Google leaders described the company’s multi-year transition to cloud computing and how it was helping them develop into a powerhouse for research and development into artificial intelligence. Brin in particular was eager to showcase how much Google was learning every day about AI and cloud implementation, according to one current and one former senior Defense Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
It wasn’t an overt sales pitch, exactly, say the officials. But the effect of the trip, during which Mattis also met representatives from Amazon, was transformative. He went west with deep reservations about a department-wide move to the cloud and returned to Washington, D.C., convinced that the U.S. military had to move much of its data to a commercial cloud provider — not just to manage files, email, and paperwork but to push mission-critical information to front-line operators.
In September, Defense Department officials announced that they would be moving onto the cloud in a big way. The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, program has since morphed into a single contract potentially worth $10 billion over a decade, to be awarded by year’s end.
The competition is still in its early phases, with a request for proposals expected as early as this week. But the senior defense official said that the race is shaping up as a three-way fight between Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — with Oracle a rather distant fourth. While Amazon and Microsoft have participated in public events related to the contract, such as an industry event on March 7, and have reached out to media, Google has kept its own interest in the contract out of the press. Company leaders have even hidden the pursuit from its own workers, according to Google employees Defense One reached.