Amazon, Microsoft and Google are the biggest winners of government contracts, according to a report from Tussell. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments.
We don’t know how much Google has received from the U.S. government, but it’s surely a substantial share of the $694 billion the federal government hands out in contracts.
Microsoft also has a large share of government contracts. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle.
The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defense with cloud services. It’s just the beginning. The Pentagon is looking for a successor plan that will be bigger.
Actually, we don’t even know the full extent of this but it is gargantuan. Yes, these companies provide the regular consumer services but a main and even decisive customer is government itself.
As a result, the old laughingstock line about backward tech at government agencies is no more. Today government is a main purchaser of tech services and is a top driver of the AI boom too.
It’s one of the best-kept secrets in American public life, hardly talked about at all by mainstream media. Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true.
An article , well worth your time.
