Amazon Web Services (AWS) has urged a US judge to halt the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI contract and assess the remaining issues with Microsoft’s winning bid. 

In a redacted court filing from October, the cloud giant said that the award must be “invalidated” as it was “the product of systematic bias” and a “flawed and politically corrupted decision”. 

AWS has again accused Donald Trump of exerting “undue influence”. The US President reportedly said “screw Amazon” when discussing the bidding process, allegedly due to an ongoing spat with the company’s founder Jeff Bezos. 

The cloud migration project was awarded to Microsoft in October 2019, but the Redmond-based tech giant hasn’t yet been able to begin its work due to legal challenges brought by AWS. Of all of the issues the cloud giant cited, a US court only found a problem with a pricing scenario quoted by Microsoft. 

In September the Department of Defence (DoD) said a court-ordered reevaluation determined that Microsoft’s proposal still represented the best value for the government, which AWS now claims is incorrect.  

“After the Court rejected the flawed initial JEDI evaluation, the DoD spent over four months attempting to revive Microsoft’s non-compliant bid and reaffirm that flawed and politically-biased decision,” an AWS spokesperson said. 

“As a result of the DoD fixing just one of many errors, the pricing differential swung substantially, with AWS now the lowest-priced bid by tens of millions of dollars.” 

The cloud giant’s argument is that the one issue the DoD did fix caused a “substantial” change, in this case making Amazon’s bid more cost-effective. As such, it is pushing for a reevaluation of the “errors that remain unaddressed”.   

“We had made clear that unless the DoD addressed all of the defects in its initial decision, we would continue to pursue a fair and objective review, and that’s exactly where we find ourselves today,” the spokesperson added.  

Microsoft did not immediately respond to CloudPro’s request for comment.