New report from Brown University's 'Costs of War' project This highlights the new closeness between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley, as the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies awarded contracts worth a total of $53 billion to big tech companies from 2019 to 2022.
As the U.S. military and intelligence agencies consider deploying AI-enabled military technology and using cloud computing services, the report's authors note: Roberto J. Gonzalez, a professor at San Jose State University, said the Pentagon and CIA now “regularly enter into multi-year contracts with major technology companies.”
Northern California's Silicon Valley is home to some of the biggest chip, computer and software companies, as well as AI startups, but that won't exist. It didn't have the same Cold War-era Pentagon funding of the 1950s and 1960s.
“Silicon Valley produced elegant small machines that could power missiles and rockets, but also had potential for peaceful uses, large and small, such as watches, calculators, appliances, and computers,” Thomas Heinrich said. I wrote about it in my 2002 book. Cold War Arsenal: Silicon Valley's Military Contracts.
However, the Brown report states that today's Pentagon spending stream is directed toward a different type of defense contractor: “Big tech companies and venture capital (VC) firm-backed “a combination of hundreds of small startups,” Gonzalez wrote.
One such huge deal was the National Security Agency's $10 billion, five-year contract with Amazon that was signed in 2021.wild & stormy” aimed at moving government agencies’ intelligence and surveillance data to Amazon’s cloud.
“These multi-year contracts, in which big tech companies primarily provide 'software-as-a-service' rather than hardware or equipment, make the Pentagon and CIA more reliant than ever on the expertise of private sector technology experts. may have an impact. sector. It is also likely to lead to a situation in which Pentagon officials continue to rely heavily on the goodwill and cooperation of technology leaders for some of their most basic functions. ” —Roberto J. Gonzalez
A lot of military funds are also being invested in startups. For example, Palantir, a currently publicly traded AI company, has contracts with the CIA, NSA, FBI, Marine Corps, Air Force, and special operations forces. Similarly, the Israeli Defense Forces. The U.S. military gave the company $800 million in 2020, and more than half of its revenue comes from the U.S. government, the paper said.
Other defense technology contractors that are still pre-IPO include Anduril Industries, Shield AI, HawkEye 360, Skydio, Rebellion Defense, and Epiru.
In terms of numbers
$53 billion: Total contract caps between U.S. military and intelligence agencies and major technology companies from 2019 to 2022
$28 billion: Gonzalez says that's probably a conservative estimate of how much the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies gave to Microsoft, Amazon and Google from 2018 to 2022.
$100 billion: How much venture capital money went into defense technology startups from 2021 to 2023?
Related agency: U.S. Strategic Capital Office
In December 2022, the Department of Defense Strategic Capital Officean organization created to connect AI and other startups with private funding sources.
“OSC aims to leverage America's comparative advantages in capital markets and economic competition to focus capital on the supply chain for critical technologies needed by the Department of Defense,” its website states. There is.