Hewlett Packard Enterprise has secured a landmark $931 million agreement with the Defense Information Systems Agency, a win that places the company at the center of one of the Pentagon’s most consequential technology overhauls. The 10-year contract accelerates the Defense Department’s move toward a private, tightly controlled cloud environment, an effort that has been underway in prototype form for more than a year.
The new initiative, known as the Distributed Hybrid Multi-Cloud program, extends HPE’s GreenLake Private Cloud across DISA’s data centers. In practical terms, the deployment will give defense agencies something they have long sought: the usability of a public cloud platform with the security and isolation of on-premises systems.
Modernizing While Safeguarding
For the Pentagon, this hybrid approach reflects a broader strategy to modernize digital operations while safeguarding the nation’s most sensitive information. Despite years of investment in public-cloud infrastructure through offerings such as the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC), large pockets of defense workloads remain too sensitive for commercial cloud environments. The GreenLake platform is intended to bridge that gap.
HPE’s system will deliver a centralized management plane, an air-gapped interface that allows administrators to oversee resources across a distributed footprint. Multi-tenancy support will further segment workloads, ensuring that individual missions or divisions can operate in contained compartments without exposure to one another. It’s a design that mirrors the cloud flexibility used widely in the private sector, adapted for the Defense Department’s unique security posture.
A central theme of the upgrade is readiness for artificial intelligence and advanced analytics. Defense leaders have pushed aggressively to integrate AI into logistics, intelligence and operational planning, a shift that requires far greater throughput and data accessibility than legacy systems can provide. The GreenLake platform, HPE claims, is built to support these AI-driven workloads while keeping data within a controlled, sovereign environment.
A Wave of Government Investments
The deal also deepens HPE’s longstanding role in government infrastructure. The company previously developed high-performance computing environments for U.S. national security agencies and has supplied supercomputers for federal research. This history makes the Pentagon’s confidence unsurprising, but the $931 million scale underscores how quickly defense computing demands are growing.
DISA officials emphasize that the DISA Cloud Instance (DCI) program, the overarching effort the HPE contract supports, is not duplicative of the JWCC’s public-cloud services. Instead, it’s designed to complement them by providing a secure option for workloads that cannot leave military-controlled facilities. As the agency describes it, DCI aims to deliver full spectrum capabilities for environments ranging from headquarters buildings to remote or infrastructure-limited regions.
The timing of the contract also reflects a wave of investment across the federal government. Amazon recently said it would pour up to $50 billion into growing AI and supercomputing capacity for its U.S. government cloud clients. With agency budgets ballooning to address AI readiness, commercial partners are racing to expand the infrastructure that makes these capabilities possible.
Multiyear Modernization Push
For HPE, the award signals that hybrid cloud, once viewed as a transitional model, has become a strategic endpoint for organizations juggling security, performance and modernization. For the Defense Department, it marks another step toward reimagining how military missions are supported technologically. The challenge ahead will be scaling this environment globally while ensuring consistency across thousands of applications and users.
If successful, the new platform could reshape how the Pentagon deploys software, analyzes data and coordinates operations. More immediately, it represents a rare point of alignment across administrations: a multiyear modernization push that both the Biden and Trump teams have allowed to move forward, even amid shifting political climates.
