AWS JEDI Offering May Face Amazon New Antitrust Investigation

AWS JEDI Offering May Face Amazon New Antitrust Investigation
In a surprising move, two Republican lawmakers wrote to the US Attorney General to investigate possible anti-competitive behavior by Amazon, while the online commerce giant pursued claims that former President Trump interfered with the JEDI (Defense Infrastructure) contract. joint venture). JEDI is the massive €2 billion project to migrate the Pentagon's IT infrastructure to the cloud. It was given to Microsoft in XNUMX, but no work was started because Amazon got a court order to stop Microsoft from starting work on the JEDI project. Last week, a US Federal Court of Claims threw out a joint request by the Department of Defense (DoD) and Microsoft to bar Amazon from taking these claims to court, leading to further delays and likely even the cancellation of the entire the JEDI project. Now, Senate member Mike Lee and Republican Ken Buck, in letters reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, assert that Amazon may have violated federal antitrust and conflict of interest laws in its pursuit of the JEDI contract.

Interest conflict

"We are concerned that Amazon has attempted to monopolize one or more markets related to government and/or commercial cloud computing services by improperly influencing the joint venture defense infrastructure procurement process," the lawmakers state. According to WSJ, the lawmakers in their letter highlight undisclosed payments between an Amazon adviser and a DoD official. They also allege that another DoD official who had previously worked as a consultant for Amazon helped write DoD's cloud acquisition strategy, despite being asked to waive any and all DoD questions. regarding Amazon. Amazon did not immediately respond to WSJ requests for comment. Via the Wall Street Journal