Amazon has a lot to lose if the US president chases its government cloud contracts
Donald Trump is reportedly out to punish Jeff Bezos, but his government departments haven’t felt the same way so far.
Backstory: Reports say that Trump is “obsessed with Amazon” and wants to “go after” it. Rumors suggest he’s motivated not by claims that the firm hurts other American businesses, but rather by the fact that Bezos owns the Washington Post, which Trump dislikes. It’s said Trump may focus on Amazon’s government cloud contracts as a means of attack.
Lots at stake: The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon Web Service’s cloud computing contracts with the government could be worth as much as $2.8 billion this year and $4.6 billion by 2019. It’s also hoping to win a 10-year contract worth $10 billion with the Department of Defense.
Stoking the spat: Bloomberg reports that Oracle’s CEO, Safra Catz, called into question the bidding process for Pentagon cloud computing contracts during a private dinner with Trump on Tuesday. She argued that the process seemed to be skewed in Amazon’s favor. The Pentagon denied partiality.
What now? Sources tell the Journal that Trump isn’t involved in deciding who wins the DoD contract, and Bloomberg notes that he didn’t suggest to Catz that he would get involved in the bidding process. Bezos will be hoping that remains the case.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.