Google abandons fight for military's $10 billion JEDI cloud contract

Google says it won’t compete for a $10 billion Pentagon cloud-computing contract to help the U.S. military better leverage artificial intelligence capabilities because the project might conflict with corporate limits on the use of its technologies.

Worth as much as $1 billion a year over a decade, the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative’s cloud-computing initiative is a part of Defense Secretary James Mattis’s drive to maintain the U.S. military’s competitive edge as artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities change the nature of battle.