Amazon provides cloud infrastructure for CIA, NSA, and FBI operations

In 2013, Amazon Web Services secured its first intelligence community contract—a $600 million deal to provide cloud services to the CIA—launching AWS’s classified data relationship across all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies (Question 1; Nextgov).

Former NSA Director Keith Alexander joined Amazon’s board of directors in Sep. 2020, seven years after leaving government service (Question 2; TechCrunch).

The Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract, awarded to AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM, is estimated at tens of billions of dollars over the next decade and a half, serving the CIA plus 16 other intelligence agencies (Questions 3 & 10; Data Center Dynamics).

Amazon won the NSA’s $10 billion cloud computing contract codenamed “WildandStormy,” prompting Microsoft to file a formal bid protest with the Government Accountability Office (Question 5; Washington Post).

Amazon Web Services remains the only commercial cloud provider authorized to host workloads at all classification levels—including top secret—for U.S. intelligence agencies (Question 6; Nextgov).

CIA Chief Information Officer La’Naia Jones stated that “AI is now being looked at in every aspect and facet of, not just CIA, but really across the intel community” (Question 7; AWS blog).

AWS Vice President Dave Levy said the company’s partnership with the intelligence community “made it a better cloud provider” by applying the community’s stringent security requirements across all AWS customers (Question 9; Nextgov).

NSA Chief Information Officer Scott Fear reported that, as of Dec. 2024, the NSA was about three to four years into moving its capabilities into the Amazon cloud (Question 14; Nextgov).