The secret behind Amazon's domination in cloud computing - POLITICO
Amazon’s massive cloud-computing unit is aggressively recruiting U.S. government officials as it pushes to make itself essential to branches such as the military and the intelligence community, a POLITICO analysis has found.
Since 2018, Amazon Web Services has hired at least 66 former government officials with acquisition, procurement or technology adoption experience, most hired directly away from government posts and more than half of them from the Defense Department. That’s a small portion of AWS’ tens of thousands of employees, but a particularly key group to its federal business. Other AWS hires have come from departments including Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.
That’s on top of more than 600 hires of government officials across all of Amazon during the same time — itself a mark of the company’s expanding footprint in the D.C. region. Amazon employs more than 1 million people overall, after adding 500,000 new jobs last year alone.
The hiring spree highlights how tech companies are becoming more entrenched in the operations of the government itself — and indispensable to Cabinet agencies and national security operations — even as politicians shout about the danger of letting them get too powerful. And as Silicon Valley becomes more essential to making the government run, it is trickier than ever for lawmakers to figure out how to check the industry’s power.
