San Francisco (AFP)
The US Department of Defense announced Thursday the postponement of its tender for a giant contract for online data storage ("cloud") for which Amazon and Microsoft are in the ranks.
The launch of this tender estimated at $ 10 billion will await the green light of the new Defense Minister Mark Esper, told Pentagon spokesman Elissa Smith AFP.
"No decision will be made on this program until it has finished examining it," she said. Mr. Esper's appointment was confirmed on July 23 by the US Senate.
The Pentagon's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract aims to modernize military computer systems. To facilitate the deployment of a new storage architecture, the Ministry of Defense decided to assign the entire contract to a single provider rather than splitting it into several tenders.
Amazon and Microsoft are the only two candidates to win this contract. Google had withdrawn from the race in October 2018, explaining that it had "not received the assurance" that this contract "would be consistent with (its) principles in artificial intelligence."
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