Public Cloud provider Google withdraws from Pentagon’s USD 10 billion Cloud Contract

The third-largest Public Cloud provider Google has decided to withdraw from Pentagon’s 10 billion dollar Cloud contract over the concerned that the job does not align with the company’s Artificial Intelligence principles.

A spokesperson of the company stated that they are working to support U.S. government in many areas, but they will not bid on the JEDI contract because they couldn’t be ensured that it would align with Google’s AI principle.

The Defense Department’s Cloud storage contract which known as JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure), worth a multi-billion dollar project. The department issued draft requests for proposals to host sensitive and classified information and will likely declare a singular winner later this year. Google supposes that this multi-cloud approach would be in the government’s best interest because it enables them to choose the right Cloud for the right workload.

As Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon were seemed as the key contestants for the job, over 3,000 of the Google’s employees signed a letter concern about developing products for the U.S. government and had protested against involvement in Pentagon pilot program, Project Maven which is an AI program designed to utilize data captured by government drones to recognize and track objects viewed on surveillance footage. The JEDI cloud contract targets to fully amalgamate all military services, however, Google staffs have the similar concern that what the technology ultimately assists the military accomplishment.