Google has dropped plans to compete for the Defense Department™s potential 10-year, $10B Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud procurement contract, Federal News Network reported Monday.
œWe couldn™t be assured that it would be aligned with our artificial intelligence (AI) principles, Aileen Black, an executive director at Google, said of the JEDI contract.
Black told the publication in an interview that the company will continue to pursue cloud opportunities within the Pentagon and other agencies.
œWe are aligning ourselves to contract vehicles that allow a multi-cloud approach and we are heavily pursuing those, she noted.
œLeaning forward and looking at the overall, the fact of the matter is the DoD is a multi-cloud environment and will continue to be one, and Google will pursue those multi-cloud, open source type environments because we believe that™s the right thing for our customers.
Some sources told the publication that Google™s withdrawal from the competition leaves Amazon Web Services, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) as likely bidders for the contract.
