WASHINGTON—Pentagon officials on Tuesday canceled the embattled JEDI cloud-computing project—which has been mired in litigation from Amazon.com Inc . and criticism from lawmakers—and said it would start anew with a revised cloud project.
“The Department [of Defense] has determined that, due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances, the JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets its needs,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
The decision is likely to open up the cloud project, known until now as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, to Amazon and potentially other cloud vendors in addition to Microsoft Corp. , which won the original competition outright in 2019. The new project will be known as Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC).
The decision represents a setback for Microsoft , which now will likely have to share the work with other companies. It marks a win for Amazon, which challenged the original JEDI award in court, and potentially other disappointed bidders.
The decision also could involve further delay for U.S. armed forces, which must continue to wait for the enterprise-level cloud computing service.
