(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court turned away a lingering appeal by Oracle Corp. stemming from its challenge to the now-scrapped $10 billion cloud-computing contract the Pentagon awarded to Microsoft Corp. in 2019.
The rejection was a formality given the Defense Department's decision in July to drop the contract and divide the work among multiple bidders, potentially between Microsoft and Amazon.com Inc.
Oracle's appeal centered on alleged conflicts of interest involving Amazon, and on claims that the Pentagon violated its own rules when it set up the contract to be awarded to a single firm.
A federal appeals court said the conflicts didn't fatally taint the contracting process. The appellate panel also ruled that Oracle wasn't hurt by the decision to award a single-source contract because the company wouldn't have qualified for a multiple-recipient award.
The Biden administration urged the Supreme Court to reject the appeal, saying it had become legally moot.
Oracle was fighting its exclusion from seeking the lucrative cloud-computing deal, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. The project was designed to help the Pentagon consolidate its technology programs and quickly move information to troops around the world.
The case is Oracle v. United States, 20-1057.
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