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Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.Com Inc., during the GeekWire Summit in Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021.
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The U.S. General Services Administration said Friday that the Defense Department has solicited bids from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle for cloud contracts.

The outreach comes after the Pentagon set aside a highly contested $10 billion contract that Microsoft had won and Amazon had challenged. The value of the new contracts is not known, but the Defense Department estimates it could run into the multiple billions of dollars.

The new effort, known as Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, or JWCC, appears like it will bolster the top providers in global cloud infrastructure, Amazon and Microsoft, although it could also provide more credibility to two smaller entities.

“The Government anticipates awarding two IDIQ contracts — one to Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) and one to Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) — but intends to award to all Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) that demonstrate the capability to meet DoD’s requirements,” the GSA said in its announcement.

An indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity, or IDIQ, contract includes an indefinite amount of services for a specific period of time.

The GSA said that only two U.S. cloud infrastructure providers, Amazon and Microsoft, appear able to comply with all of the Pentagon’s requirements, which include “tactical edge devices” that can operate outside of traditional data centers and support for all levels of data classification.

Amazon and Microsoft are the two companies that were the finalists for a single Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, contract. That contract was meant to go to a single provider and was expected to be worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. Microsoft won it in 2019, Amazon filed a protest and ultimately in July the Pentagon chose to cancel the contract.

Andy Jassy, currently Amazon’s CEO and previously head of AWS, argued that there was political interference in the award of the contract. Guy Snodgrass, who was speechwriter for former Defense Secretary James Mattis, asserted in a book that former President Donald Trump called Mattis and said to “screw Amazon” out of a chance to bid on JEDI. But the Pentagon’s inspector general determined that the contract did not seem to have been influenced by the White House.

The JWCC differs from JEDI because it’s designed to have the Pentagon rely on multiple cloud providers.

The Pentagon expects each of the IDIQ contracts to have a three-year base period and two year-long option periods.

Google spokesperson Ben Jose pointed to a blog post from last week that said the company planned to pursue a bid for the military contract, noting the Pentagon is the world’s largest employer. CNBC reported Monday that executives attempted to tactfully address growing employee concern over the contract and previously established artificial intelligence principles, after employees protested against Google’s plans to bid on the JEDI contract.

Amazon and Microsoft representatives didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Oracle declined to comment.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

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Astronomer HR chief Kristin Cabot resigns following Coldplay ‘kiss cam’ incident

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Astronomer HR chief Kristin Cabot resigns following Coldplay 'kiss cam' incident

Chris Martin of Coldplay performs live at San Siro Stadium, Milan, Italy, in July 2017.

Mairo Cinquetti | NurPhoto | Getty Images

Days after Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigned from the tech startup, the HR exec who was with him at the infamous Coldplay concert has left as well.

“Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to CNBC Thursday. Cabot was the company’s chief people officer.

Cabot and Byron, who is married with children, were shown in an intimate moment on the ‘kiss cam’ at a recent Coldplay show in Boston, and immediately hid when they saw their faces on the big screen. Lead singer Chris Martin said, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.” An attendee’s video of the incident went viral.

Byron resigned from the company on Saturday. Both Cabot and Byron have been removed the company’s leadership team webpage.

Pete DeJoy, Astronomer’s interim CEO, wrote in a post earlier this week that recent and unexpected national attention has turned the company into “a household name.”

In May, the New York-based company, which commercializes open source software, announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.

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Musk’s Starlink hit with outage day after rollout of T-Mobile satellite service

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Musk's Starlink hit with outage day after rollout of T-Mobile satellite service

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Elon Musk‘s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.

There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.

Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.

Musk apologized for the outage on his social media platform X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”

Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.

T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach.”

Starlink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the T-Satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage.

Read more CNBC tech news

CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this story.

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Intel beats on revenue, slashes foundry investments as CEO says ‘no more blank checks’

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Intel beats on revenue, slashes foundry investments as CEO says 'no more blank checks'

The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.

Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
  • Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated

Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.

For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.

The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.

In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.

Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.

Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.

Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.

Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.

“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”

Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.

“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.

The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.

Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.

Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.

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