The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is looking to cloud service providers to help it get access to artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

The agency is keen to adopt AI into its cloud environment, but is constrained by the computing power needed to support large language models, reports NextGov.

As a result, the agency is turning to its cloud services vehicle, said Larry Taxson, chief of CloudWorks in the CIA's Directorate of Digital Innovation during a webinar.

CloudWorks helps intelligence partners access cloud services via the CIA's C2E contract which was awarded to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Oracle in 2020. Under the award, each company will be able to compete for specific task orders at various classification levels for the CIA and the 16 other agencies in the intelligence community.

Taxson said that the CIA is trying "to get modern capabilities in the hand of mission partners as soon as we can.”

Taxson added that the agency is working closely with the five cloud providers "to see how we can get commercial [large language models] up into our high-side environments, hopefully by the end of this year or early next year.”

According to Taxson, the CIA has a lot of GPU capacity available via the C2E, but the agency doesn't intend to "suck the whole Internet up." It is also exploring the possibility of small language models for niche topic areas, and will consider what compute capacity it actually needs for that.

“The last thing we want to do is keep pushing our [cloud service providers] to give us all these capabilities and then they stay dormant that nobody uses them,” Taxson said.

In May 2024, Bloomberg reported that the CIA was using a Microsoft generative AI model that was "air-gapped" from the Internet. According to the report, this was the first time a major large language model had operated fully separated from the Internet and was the result of 18 months of work.

The major cloud providers have massive quantities of GPUs already under their belts, with Statista estimating that Microsoft purchased as many as 150,000 H100s from Nvidia in 2023, with Amazon and Google falling around the 50,000 mark. The exact number has not been shared by the companies.

AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle are also among those set to receive the first orders of Nvidia's Blackwell GPU line.