Microsoft's protest is useless! The US National Security Agency re-awarded Amazon AWS a $10 billion contract!

It is learned that according to foreign media reports, the US National Security Agency (NSA) recently announced that it would officially award a secret cloud computing contract worth up to US$10 billion to Amazon AWS.

According to reports, in August last year, the contract, named "Wild and Stormy", was first awarded to AWS in July 2021, but was opposed by technology giant Microsoft. The reason is that the NSA had previously awarded the contract to five companies-AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM for bidding, and Amazon was not among them, but it won the contract.

According to reports, after Microsoft protested, the U.S. Government Accountability Office expressed support for Microsoft's protest and recommended that the National Security Agency re-evaluate the proposals of the two companies. The NSA also said it would accept the recommendation.

However, despite the re-evaluation, the NSA still chose Amazon AWS. An NSA spokesperson said: "The award of the contract to Amazon AWS is the best value decision after re-evaluating the proposal."

The NSA spokesperson added: "The contract with Amazon AWS is a continuation of the NSA's hybrid computing program to modernize and meet its powerful processing and analysis requirements. NSA will work with Amazon AWS to improve national security capabilities."

We have learned that for nearly a decade, the NSA has been able to ingest data, including signals intelligence and other foreign surveillance intelligence information, from its multiple repositories around the world and then transfer it to its internal operating databases for analysis and processing by analysts from the NSA and other IC agencies.

It is reported that AWS is Amazon's most profitable business unit and has signed multiple cooperation agreements with the CIA. In 2013, AWS first signed a $600 million cloud computing contract with the CIA called C2S. Last year, AWS won at least part of the CIA's multi-billion dollar follow-up C2E contract. This cooperation with the NSA further confirms Amazon's strength in the cloud computing market, and the cooperation will also enable Amazon AWS business to further expand.

Editor ✎ Nicole/

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