Google has said it will drop out of bidding for a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the U.S. Defence Department. This is as a result of Google’s new ethical guidelines not aligning with the project. But, Google has not elaborated further on the conflict with corporate values.
The project is known as the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure cloud, or JEDI. It involves transitioning a large amount of Defence Department data to a commercially operated cloud system. On 12 October companies are due to submit their bids for the contract that could last up to 10 years.
The announcement has come just months following the company’s decision not to renew an agreement with an artificial intelligence program. This was caused by protests from the company’s employees over collaborating with the military. As a result, a set of ethical principles were released to assist the company in deciding what projects to pursue in the future.
In a statement, a spokesman from Google said:
“We are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI principles.”
“And second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications.”
According to the Tech Workers Coalition, Google employees “have significant power, and are willing to use it”.
It is the extensive pressure from its employees that caused the decision to withdraw from the bidding competition.
Moreover, a spokesman continued in a statement:
“Had the JEDI contract been open to multiple vendors, we would have submitted a compelling solution for portions of it”.
“Google Cloud believes that a multi-cloud approach is in the best interest of government agencies. It allows them to choose the right cloud for the right workload”.
At 19:58 GMT-4 yesterday, shares in Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) were trading at -1.02%.
