Sources: Microsoft asks Google, Oracle, and others to help pressure the US into spreading its cloud spending across more services, challenging AWS' dominance
Aaron Tilley / Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @mgsiegler Tweets: M.G. Siegler / @mgsiegler : The best part of this report is where it notes that Microsoft has not yet asked Amazon to join its anti-Amazon alliance. Again, not *yet*. https://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the latest move in a decade-long campaign by AWS' rivals to dent its lead. Google and Microsoft have chased Amazon since at least 2016 (coordinated catch-up efforts), Microsoft and Oracle linked their US data centers in 2019 explicitly to unite against AWS (data center partnership), and by late 2021 the three were investing in potential cloud clients to seed workloads away from Amazon.
What changes now is the target: instead of competing deal-by-deal, Microsoft is asking Google, Oracle and others to lobby the US government itself to spread its cloud spending across more providers — turning procurement policy into the battleground. Notably, per M.G. Siegler's read of the report, Amazon has not been asked to join the anti-Amazon alliance.
First-order effects
- AWS' grip on US government cloud contracts becomes the direct object of a coordinated lobbying push, with Microsoft, Google and Oracle seeking a larger slice of federal spending through policy rather than product wins.
- Google and Oracle face an awkward choice: join a Microsoft-led alliance even though Google has separately attacked Microsoft's own cloud practices in Europe.
Second-order effects
- The alliance sits on top of open rivalry — Google's EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft's cloud practices and Microsoft's accusation that Google runs "shadow campaigns" against it with European regulators show both are willing to weaponize regulators against each other, making this coalition purely transactional.
- Amazon's likely response is counter-lobbying: if US procurement tilts toward multi-provider mandates, AWS must defend its incumbency in Washington rather than rely on technical lock-in.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hyperscaler competition migrates from pricing and features to shaping the rules of public procurement — with each vendor alternately allying against the market leader and litigating against its allies, as the EU complaints already preview.
- Government buyers become the lever that can restructure cloud market share: a US shift toward spreading spending across providers would validate the same multi-cloud demands Google is pressing in Brussels, pressuring AWS everywhere public-sector contracts dominate.
The trend: Hyperscalers are shifting from competing for cloud deals individually to collectively reshaping government procurement rules — while simultaneously filing antitrust complaints against each other in parallel jurisdictions.