The US Department of Defence (DoD) invited Google and Oracle to a list of bidders for a multi-billion dollar cloud contract which includes Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Companies are being invited to bid for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract which replaced Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI), a deal originally won by Microsoft but then scrapped after the DoD changed its requirements.

The agency explained it expects to award indefinite quantity of services for a fixed time (IDIQ) contracts to multiple companies for a period of three years with two 12-month option periods.

Microsoft and AWS are expected to win two of the contracts, the DoD stated explaining they are the only companies capable of meeting all its requirements, including resilience, centralised management, distributed cloud and global accessibility.

The DoD is asking each bidder to list their points of presence by continent.

IBM, which protested the requirements of the JEDI contract, was not invited to bid for the JWCC contract.