The Wall Street Journal: Years after employee revolt, Google again pursuing Pentagon contract

Google is pursuing a massive cloud-computing contract with the Department of Defense, nearly three years after abandoning a similar bid process in the face of employee protests.

The head of the Alphabet Inc.
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subsidiary’s cloud division, Thomas Kurian, met this week with Pentagon officials to discuss the bid process for a contract called the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, according to people familiar with the meeting.

The three-year contract will be split across multiple bidders. It replaces the 10-year, $10 billion JEDI cloud-computing contract terminated in July, which was planned to consolidate the Pentagon’s patchwork of data systems to give defense personnel better access to real-time information and artificial-intelligence capabilities.

The Pentagon said the contract was canceled because of its evolving needs. The project was mired in years of squabbling between Microsoft Corp.
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which won the bidding, and Amazon.com Inc.
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which contended the process was politically motivated under the Trump administration.

Google’s plan to bid will be a major test of Chief Executive Sundar Pichai’s success in taming what has been an outspoken workforce. In 2018, the company came under fire from employee activists over a Pentagon contract to supply imaging tools used by drones. Several outspoken employees quit.

An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.

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