The American bureaucracy may prove a lucrative customer

Over the past decade Amazon Web Services (aws) lured untold numbers of consumers and corporations onto its billowing cloud. The division earned its giant e-commerce parent $7.3bn in operating profits last year. It could soon be earning more. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, is going after a potentially more lucrative customer: the government. Amazon has outspent all technology firms on lobbying in the first quarter, and is building a second headquarters in Virginia, near the Pentagon.

No wonder. Next month the Defence Department may award a cloud-computing contract worth $10bn. The Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (jedi) initiative aims to create a unified “war-fighter cloud” to modernise the Pentagon’s existing networks and data centres. In April aws and Microsoft edged out Oracle and ibm onto the final shortlist.