CIA Awards Multibillion-Dollar C2E Cloud Contract to Oracle, AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM

The Central Intelligence Agency awarded its Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract to five major technology companies—Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, and IBM—on November 20, 2020. The multi-cloud contract, valued at tens of billions of dollars over a 15-year period, represents the intelligence community’s next-generation cloud infrastructure serving the CIA and all 16 other U.S. intelligence agencies.

Through this multiple-award indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicle, the five companies will compete for specific task orders issued by the CIA on behalf of the entire intelligence community. The C2E contract encompasses foundational cloud services including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) capabilities, as well as professional services across all classification levels.

The C2E contract replaces the previous Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract, which was awarded solely to Amazon Web Services in 2013 for $600 million. The shift from a single-vendor to multi-vendor approach reflects both the maturation of cloud technology and the intelligence community’s desire to avoid dependence on a single provider. However, this consolidation among five major corporations creates an oligopoly controlling the intelligence community’s most sensitive data infrastructure.

Oracle’s inclusion in this contract is particularly significant given Larry Ellison’s political support for Donald Trump and Oracle’s historical origins as a CIA contractor. The contract award came only nine months after Ellison hosted a $7 million fundraiser for Trump’s 2020 campaign, raising questions about whether political relationships influenced the procurement process. Oracle’s position as a C2E contract holder provides the company with access to the intelligence community’s most classified data and operations, deepening the integration between a politically-connected private corporation and the surveillance state.

This contract exemplifies the privatization of intelligence infrastructure, where commercial technology companies gain unprecedented access to national security operations, classified information, and surveillance capabilities. The 15-year contract duration and multibillion-dollar value create long-term dependencies that may prove difficult to unwind, effectively embedding these corporations into the permanent architecture of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.