Oracle has picked up an $88 million contract with the US Air Force to provide cloud infrastructure services for the department's Cloud One program.

Big Red said that the program will provide users at the Department of Defense (DoD) with access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services, supporting all the required security, performance, and resiliency across multiple classification levels.

Cloud One is a multi-cloud, multi-vendor platform managed by the Air Force and available to other DoD users, described as "a one-stop shop for DoD mission application owners that require a full array of commercial cloud services."

The move follows from the DoD awarding Amazon's AWS a much larger, about $581 million contract in support of the Cloud One Program in January.

OCI provides dedicated and secure datacenter support for the DoD users, including Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, Special Access Programs, and Defense Information Systems Agency Impact Levels 5 and 6 (DoD IL5 and IL6) workloads.

As everything today has to have AI, mission owners will have access through the program to Oracle AI Database 26ai on OCI. This will allow them to securely combine organization-specific information and public information when running agentic AI workflows to securely generate sophisticated answers and perform actions autonomously, at least according to Oracle.

The firm also states that its Oracle National Security Regions are only operated by cleared US citizens. That's a step up from Microsoft, which reportedly used China-based workers on US government cloud services.

"Oracle remains committed to the DoW's mission and our next-generation database services and analytics, including Oracle AI Database 26ai, are transformative additions to its Cloud One strategy," said Oracle's EVP for government, defense and intelligence Kim Lynch.

"With this latest contract award, defense customers can confidently advance their most critical missions knowing Oracle's secure, trusted technologies provide the highest standards of security, compliance, and reliability required to meet their unique operational demands."

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More recently, Oracle has become embroiled in the AI infrastructure game, worrying investors at the end of last year that its capital expenditure will be $15 billion higher than previously predicted, in order to have all the cloud capacity that its customers say they will need for AI workloads.

This year, the talk was that the company might have to cut up to 30,000 jobs and sell its health tech unit Cerner in order to ease its AI infrastructure financing challenges.

We're not sure that $88 million from the Pentagon will help much when Oracle plans to raise $45 billion to $50 billion this year to expand its cloud infrastructure, but every little bit of revenue is good for the bottom line.

The new OCI offerings for Cloud One and its government customers are on a firm-fixed-price contract basis. According to Oracle, the firm-fixed-price task order runs through December 7, 2028, with work performed at contractor-designated facilities across the United States. ®