The contract has a tenure of 10 years and the contesting companies need to submit bids by October 12. The other players who are in the fray include Amazon.com (AMZN) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT).
The government had released the final requirements for the JEDI project in July. The Pentagon intends to select just one bidder for the project, but companies such as Microsoft, International Business Machines (IBM), and Oracle (ORCL) have sought for splitting the contract among a number of providers.
However, the Defense Department believes assigning multiple vendors would make it a slow process that could prevent the agency from delivering new capabilities and improved efficiency to the warfighter. The department continues to maintain other contracts with cloud providers apart from the JEDI cloud contract.
The previous drone contract code-named Project Maven involved providing machine-learning capabilities to the military for assessing footages from drones in order to take decisions related to surveillance and national security.
Google’s employees felt the technology could also be used in unethical ways such as targeted elimination. The company planned to end this after finishing up existing commitments by early next year.