Google is pursuing a new cloud pact with the US Department of Defense (DoD) that could net billions of dollars, reports suggest. According to the New York Times, the company is preparing an offer to work on the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) program, the spiritual successor to the JEDI initiative in trouble, which was canceled this summer. In July, the department stated that it would particularly request proposals from Microsoft and AWS, which it considered the only 2 hyperscalers capable of meeting its needs. However, Google also seems to be ready to appear. It is expected that in the month of April XNUMX, a decision will be made on which companies will participate in the JWCC program.
successor to JEDI
Although few concrete details are known about what the JWCC program will entail, DoD documentation suggests that participating cloud vendors will help bring new capabilities to warfighters in the US military. “The JWCC will support combatant capabilities such as Joint All Field Command and Control, or JADC2, and the DoD Artificial Intelligence and Data Acceleration Initiative, or ADA,” the department explained. In another document, the department asserts that participating dealers should be equipped to "manage advanced data analytics services that enable timely, data-driven decision-making with confidence at the tactical level." The Pentagon has also previously hinted that the JWCC will achieve the original ambitions of the JEDI contract, but in a way that reflects the latest advances in cloud technology. "JEDI, built with noble pretense and a baseline now multiple years ago, was developed at a time when the department's needs were different and our knowledge of the cloud was less mature," said John Sherman, CIO at DoD. “JWCC's multi-cloud environment will serve our future in a way that JEDI's unique reward and cloud fabric simply cannot. "Although the new cloud pact has the potential to be really profitable for Google (and other potential winners), the company is expected to face internal resistance from certain neighborhoods. In XNUMX, when news broke that Google was cooperating with the Pentagon on a project involving the use of AI to examine images captured by military drones, thousands upon thousands of employees voiced their objections.The company has since let that contract expire and has promised employees that it will not bid on military contracts that involve the development of weapons or surveillance capabilities related to artificial intelligence.However, Google never again vowed to work with the Department of Defense.The Alphabet Workers Union, whose creation was influenced in part by a dispute over the previous contract from the Department of Defense, has already announced that it will oppose Google's participation in the JWCC project.Also check out our lists of the best bare-metal servers, the best dedicated servers, and the best servers for small businesses.