I love how they offered $5 million in amazon kindles and hosting to them. How absolutely daft. Couldn't they just offer money? (Not that it's more likely to work, but the kindles and hosting was ridiculous).
Same reason you get more trade-in credit for a giftcard then cash, hosting is "virtually" free, and kindles only cost production + shipping cost.
Not defending them, this is a useless offer, just offering another reason they'd have.
I still agree it's a stupid offer from amazon though.
In this case, I could see AWS hosting being useful to them (maybe even something along the lines of GovCloud like AWS runs for the US Government)