Amazon Web Services Inc. is requesting a court order to halt work temporarily on the U.S. Defense Department’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud computing contract, which was awarded to Microsoft Corp. last year after a hotly contested bidding process. 

The move came to light in a court filing released Monday. AWS, Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing company, plans to file its request for a temporary restraining order formally on Jan. 24 and a decision is expected on Feb. 11.

The legal saga is playing out at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, where the Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary sued the DOD last year to contest the awarding of the JEDI contract to Microsoft. AWS competed with Microsoft during the bidding process and was widely expected to nab the deal on account of factors, including its prior work with the DOD. However, the deal ended up being signed with Microsoft in a decision that AWS said was mired by “egregious errors.”

The provider is alleging that improper pressure from President Donald Trump influenced DOD officials to pass it over for JEDI. In the suit, AWS said that the interference took the form of “public and behind-the-scenes attacks” by Trump against Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos. AWS CEO Andy Jassy told SiliconANGLE in November that “I think there was a significant amount of political interference,” adding that “in any objective apples-to-apples comparison of our platform versus others, you don’t end up with the conclusion that they made.”

JEDI will be worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. The project will see the DOD and its various branches standardize their digital operations on cloud-based infrastructure, as well as deploy other new technologies such as modular data centers that can be set up in the field. 

The text of AWS’ filing this week specifies it will ask the court to “prevent the issuance of substantive task orders under the contract.” The way “substantive” ends up being defined will likely be key to shaping how far the order goes in limiting Microsoft. Microsoft has already started working on JEDI, President Brad Smith said in December, work that the executive described as a continuation of the technical preparations it did before winning the deal. 

“We were working every day before we won that contract to make the product better,” Smith said in a CNBC interview. “We have if anything been moving even faster since that contract was awarded.”

JEDI is not the only DOD mega-deal Microsoft won last year. In August, while JEDI bids were still being reviewed, the department entrusted Dell Technologies Inc. and two other firms with migrating its core internal collaboration workflows to Office 365. The contract is set to run for up to a decade and will be worth as much as $7.6 billion. 

Photo: David B. Gleason/Flickr