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Seattle / Washington (dpa) - The Pentagon has ordered headsets and cloud services from Microsoft for up to 21.9 billion dollars (18.6 billion euros).
The contract runs for up to ten years and includes the production of around 120,000 augmented reality glasses based on Microsoft's Hololens hardware, as a company spokesman said.
Microsoft initially agreed to develop prototypes for around $ 480 million in 2018.
Hololens glasses retail for $ 3,500, but the deal with the military goes far beyond that.
The program called Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) is based on Microsoft's cloud services for the Azure platform.
Soldiers should not only have access to common services such as night vision and thermal imaging functions via the headsets, but also important data to facilitate tactical and strategic decisions with the help of augmented reality.
Augmented Reality, AR for short, means augmented reality, artificial objects are faded into the real environment.
The US military announced on Wednesday that it has high hopes for this technology.
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The deal makes Microsoft an increasingly important partner to the US Department of Defense.
The software company had previously landed a ten billion dollar cloud contract from the Pentagon, which, however, led to complaints and lawsuits from competitor Amazon.
Whether Microsoft will receive the full amount of almost 22 billion dollars in the deal that has now been agreed depends, among other things, on whether the US government draws an option for another five years after five years.
Investors reacted cautiously at first, the share made no major leaps.
The fact that the company is selling its technology to the military has been a source of criticism from some employees for years.
The Microsoft Workers 4 Good initiative has now renewed its concerns and demanded on Twitter that instead of “building weapons of war” the company should, for example, advocate for the rights of transgender people.
When Microsoft signed the contract for prototypes with the Ministry of Defense around two and a half years ago, there was a petition from almost 100 employees to stop the deal and the development of any weapon technology.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210401-99-59464 / 4