US Army contract Microsoft for 120,000 AR headsets, valued at $22 billion
In a statement on Thursday, Microsoft announced that it has received a contract to outfit the United States Army with tens of thousands of augmented reality headsets based on the company’s HoloLens tech.
The contract, which could be worth as much as $21.88 billion over 10 years, would require Microsoft to fulfill an order for 120,000 AR headsets for the Army based on their Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) design. The modified design upgrades the capabilities of the HoloLens 2 for the needs of soldiers in the field.
The contract builds on the two-year $480 million contracts that Microsoft won back in 2018 to outfit the U.S. Army with augmented reality tech. At the time, the contract detailed that the deal could potentially result in follow-on orders of more than 100,000 headsets. “Augmented reality technology will provide troops with more and better information to make decisions. This new work extends our longstanding, trusted relationship with the Department of Defense to this new area,” a Microsoft spokesperson had said in a statement sent at the time.
This announcement marks the transition from prototyping these designs to producing and rolling them out in the field.
The massive scaleup for augmented reality tech has seen few large-scale rollouts and gives Microsoft a government contractor budget to tackle base technology problems that could scale down to consumer and enterprise-level devices in the future.
