Project Nimbus

Google and Amazon cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government and military, awarded in 2021

Project Nimbus
Type	Government cloud-computing contract
Start date	21 April 2021
Location	Israel
Participants	Google (Google Cloud); Amazon Web Services; the government of Israel, including the Israeli Ministry of Finance, the Israeli Ministry of Defence and the Israel Defense Forces
Organisers	Government Procurement Administration, in the Accountant General's division of the Israeli Ministry of Finance
Website	Government Procurement Administration: Project Nimbus

Project Nimbus is a cloud-computing contract between the government of Israel and the US companies Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Israel's Finance Ministry announced the award on 21 April 2021, saying the two companies had been chosen, ahead of Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, to provide public cloud services to the government, the defence system and other public bodies. Google's own announcement described a four-phase project with an initial term of seven years, which the government may extend to as long as 23 years in total.

The official page of the Government Procurement Administration, in the Accountant General's division of the Ministry of Finance, describes Project Nimbus as a "multi-year, large-scale flagship project" that began at the start of 2019. It says the administration leads the project in collaboration with the Israel National Digital Agency, the ministry's legal department and budget division, the Israel National Cyber Directorate, the Israeli Ministry of Defence and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Ctech, reporting the award and citing the Finance Ministry, wrote that AWS and Google would "establish local cloud sites in Israel with an initial investment of NIS 4 billion ($1.2 billion)", and described the work as a "$1.2 billion project to provide cloud services for the country's public sector and military".

Reporting since 2022 has described the IDF and the defence ministry as central users of the contract, and has documented worker protests under the banner of No Tech for Apartheid. In April 2024 Google fired more than 50 employees after sit-in protests at its offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California. Investigations by Wired, The Intercept, +972 Magazine and Local Call, and later by The Guardian with those two outlets, have reported on military and intelligence use of the contractors' cloud platforms, on mandatory users including state-owned arms manufacturers, and on unusual contractual terms that, according to leaked Israeli government documents, restrict Google's and Amazon's ability to suspend or limit Israel's access to the services. Google has said that the contract "is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services" and that government ministries agree to comply with its terms of service and acceptable use policy.

The contract

Award, parties and value

On 21 April 2021 Ctech reported that the Israeli government had chosen AWS and Google for the project, that they had beaten Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, and that Oracle and Microsoft had appealed to the courts in an attempt to delay the announcement. Google announced on 25 May 2021 that it had been selected "to provide public cloud services to help address the country’s challenges within the public sector, including in healthcare, transportation, and education." The company said the agreement would "deliver cloud services to all government entities from across the state, including ministries, authorities, and government-owned companies", and would also be available for higher education, health-maintenance organisations and municipalities.

AWS, in a 11 June 2021 announcement of a planned infrastructure region in Israel, said the government had "selected AWS as its primary cloud provider as part of the “Nimbus” contract for government ministries and subsidiaries." The same statement quoted the Accountant General, Yali Rothenberg, congratulating AWS "on their winning bid in the first tender of Project Nimbus, a multi-year flagship project led by the Israeli Government Procurement Administration". Google and AWS were both named as winners of that first tender; the official procurement page still lists both as the chosen public-cloud providers.

On the project's value, Ctech used two formulations on the day of the award: it described a "$1.2 billion project to provide cloud services for the country's public sector and military", and wrote that the companies would "establish local cloud sites in Israel with an initial investment of NIS 4 billion ($1.2 billion)". Later reporting has commonly called it a $1.2 billion contract. Google's own blog post did not state a figure. The official procurement page likewise does not state a contract value.

Google said the project would run for an initial period of seven years, and that the government "may extend the engagement for up to 23 years in total". The Guardian, reporting in 2025 on the completed agreement, likewise described an initial seven-year term "with the possibility of extension".

Ctech reported that the Finance Ministry described four phases at the time of the award: acquisition and construction of cloud infrastructure; formulating government policy for migrating to the cloud; integration and migration; and control and optimisation of cloud activity. The ministry, it wrote, called Nimbus a flagship project "intended to provide a comprehensive solution for the provision of cloud services to the government, the defense system and other groups in the economy." The official procurement page now describes five "central layers": provision of public cloud services by AWS and Google; development of government cloud policy and a Cloud Center of Excellence, led by the Israel National Digital Agency; consultation, assistance, migration and integration; monitoring, optimisation and cloud FinOps; and a government digital marketplace through which ministries can buy third-party services on the AWS and Google platforms.

Intended users

Beyond the civilian ministries, authorities, government-owned companies, universities, health funds and municipalities named in Google's announcement, official and contemporaneous descriptions included the defence establishment and the IDF. Ctech quoted the Finance Ministry as saying the project would serve "the government, the defense system and other groups in the economy". The official procurement page lists the Ministry of Defense and the IDF among the bodies with which the project is led.

Wired later reported, from public documents and official statements, that the IDF had been "central to Project Nimbus since its inception, shaping the project’s design and serving as some of its most important users." It quoted a 2022 Finance Ministry statement to the Israeli outlet Mako: "Project Nimbus is a project to supply public cloud services to the government, the defense department and the IDF", and "the relevant security bodies were partners of this project from its first day, and are full partners still." The same investigation cited a 2021 State Comptroller audit as saying the IDF had joined "to enable the transfer of declassified systems to the public cloud" and that "the Ministry of Defense and the IDF are crucial parts of the team working on the tender, both in creating the requirements and in assessing the outcomes." A government document of June 2022, Wired wrote, said the Ministry of Defense and the IDF would get a dedicated "digital marketplace" of services under the contract.

In May 2024 The Intercept reported on a 63-page Israeli government procurement document whose list of obligatory cloud customers included the Bank of Israel, the Israel Airports Authority and the Settlement Division, which the newspaper described as "a quasi-governmental body tasked with expanding Israel’s illegal colonies in the West Bank" (in the occupied West Bank). The same list, it reported, included two state-owned arms manufacturers, Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

Local cloud regions

A stated aim of the tender was that government data would be processed and stored at local sites in Israel, rather than only at overseas data centres. Ctech reported that the local sites would "keep information within Israel's borders under strict security guidelines." AWS announced in June 2021 that it would open an AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region in the first half of 2023, and launched that region on 1 August 2023. In the launch statement the Accountant General, Yali Rothenberg, said: "We are excited to welcome the new AWS Region to Israel as part of project Nimbus." +972 Magazine and Local Call wrote that Google and Amazon established data centres in Israel in 2022 and 2023 respectively, and that this "infrastructure" under Israeli jurisdiction made it easier, in the words of one contractor they interviewed, for "security entities, even the more sensitive ones", to store information in the cloud "without fear from overseas courts".

Contract terms

The Guardian, in a joint investigation with +972 Magazine and Local Call published in October 2025, reported on leaked Israeli government documents and official descriptions of the 2021 agreement. According to that reporting, the terms prohibit Google and Amazon from restricting how Israeli government agencies, security services and military units use the cloud services, and from suspending or withdrawing Israel's access even if the use is found to violate the companies' terms of service. An Israeli official familiar with the project told the newspapers there can be "no restrictions" on the kind of information moved onto the platforms, including military and intelligence data; the terms seen by The Guardian state that Israel is "entitled to migrate to the cloud or generate in the cloud any content data they wish". A Finance Ministry analysis, the newspapers reported, said that provided Israel does not infringe copyright or resell the technology, "the government is permitted to make use of any service that is permitted by Israeli law". Officials inserted the controls, the investigation said, because they feared the companies might withdraw access under employee, shareholder or legal pressure linked to human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories. Under the deal, taking such action would "discriminate" against the Israeli government and would incur financial penalties and legal action for breach of contract.

The same investigation described a "winking mechanism" written into the agreement. Because the companies are often legally barred from telling a customer that they have handed its data to a foreign law-enforcement authority, Israeli officials required them to send a coded signal in the form of a payment — "special compensation" — whose amount would correspond to the telephone dialling code of the country that had received the data, or a backstop payment of 100,000 shekels if even that signal was barred. Google and Amazon denied evading legal obligations. A Google spokesperson said: "The idea that we would evade our legal obligations to the US government as a US company, or in any other country, is categorically wrong." An Amazon spokesperson said: "We do not have any processes in place to circumvent our confidentiality obligations on lawfully binding orders." A spokesperson for Israel's Finance Ministry said: "The article’s insinuation that Israel compels companies to breach the law is baseless," and that the companies are "bound by stringent contractual obligations that safeguard Israel’s vital interests."

Google has separately told reporters that "the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy", and that "this work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services." The Intercept reported that a December 2020 email from a Google lawyer, written before the contract was won, told executives that "If Google wins the competition, we will need to accept a non negotiable contract on terms favourable to the government," and that the deal is subject to an "adjusted" policy rather than the company's general terms of service. A government memo circulated after the deal was signed, according to The Guardian, stated that the companies "understand the sensitivities of the Israeli government and are willing to accept our requirements."

Military and security use

In July 2022 The Intercept reported on training materials and videos from a Nimbus educational portal, which it said showed Google offering the Israeli government the "full suite of machine-learning and AI tools available through Google Cloud Platform", including facial detection, automated image categorisation, object tracking and sentiment analysis. The materials, it wrote, referred to agency-specific trainings, citing the Ministry of Defense as an example. Wired later wrote that Time had quoted an internal Google document saying the Israeli Ministry of Defense has its own "landing zone" into the company's Project Nimbus infrastructure.

In February 2024, at a conference dedicated to Project Nimbus, the head of the Israel National Cyber Directorate, Gaby Portnoy, was quoted by the trade publication People and Computers as saying: "Phenomenal things are happening in battle because of the Nimbus public cloud, things that are impactful for victory. And I will not share details." Wired reported the remark and noted that Portnoy and the directorate did not respond to a request for comment. The magazine presented the statement as contradicting Google's public description of the contract.

In August 2024 +972 Magazine and Local Call reported that, at an "IT for IDF" conference on 10 July 2024, Col. Racheli Dembinsky, commander of the IDF's Center of Computing and Information Systems (Mamram), told an audience that the army was using cloud storage and artificial intelligence services from AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure in the war on Gaza that began in October 2023, and that the "most important" advantage was the companies' AI capabilities, which she said had granted "very significant operational effectiveness" in the Gaza Strip. The IDF told the newspapers that classified information and attack systems on the army's internal cloud had not been moved to the public clouds. The investigation reported, however, that according to three intelligence sources a data system used by Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate for mass surveillance of Gaza's population has been stored on AWS since at least the end of 2022, and that it has on some occasions provided "supplementary information" ahead of airstrikes. Multiple security sources told the newspapers that, at least since October 2023, cloud companies had been providing storage and AI services to army units that deal with classified information, and that most purchases from Google and Amazon had happened through the Nimbus contract. The investigation also said it could not confirm whether the AWS system used to store intelligence was itself purchased as part of Project Nimbus.

The Guardian investigation of October 2025 reported that during the offensive in Gaza, where, it wrote, a UN commission of inquiry had concluded that Israel has committed genocide, the Israeli military "has relied heavily on cloud providers to store and analyse large volumes of data and intelligence information." It noted that a separate trove of intercepted Palestinian telephone calls had been stored on Microsoft's Azure platform until Microsoft cut off that access, and that, according to intelligence sources, the military planned to move the data to AWS. Amazon, the newspaper said, did not respond to questions about that plan. Microsoft was a bidder for Nimbus but lost; according to sources familiar with the negotiations, cited by The Guardian, its bid "suffered as it refused to accept some of Israel’s demands."

Unit 8200 and related firms

Dror Kashti, a retired brigadier general who became chief information security officer of the IDF after a career in Unit 8200, has written that "one of my final projects was to implement security for Project Nimbus, the IDF’s move to the public cloud". He later co-founded the cloud-security company Sweet Security with former Unit 8200 and Unit 81 officers. TechCrunch reported that, according to Kashti, towards the end of his service "the Israeli government and military prepared for Project Nimbus, the cloud computing project that looked into how Israel could move its sensitive workloads securely into the cloud", which the publication noted "wasn't uncontroversial", and that Kashti said he "needed to sign the security paragraph of this project". Sweet Security is among the cyber and tech firms founded or led by veterans of Unit 8200 or other occupation-forces units.

The +972 and Local Call investigation also quoted a 2021 book by the then commander of Unit 8200, later identified as Yossi Sariel, asking: "How can the security establishments use the ‘Amazon cloud’ and feel secure?" and arguing that the volume of secret information collected by Israeli intelligence was so large that it could be stored "only in companies such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft." In the same year, the newspapers wrote, the deputy commander of Unit 8200 called in an Israeli intelligence journal for "new partnerships" with public cloud providers, whose AI capabilities he described as "irreplaceable". Those remarks concerned public-cloud use by the intelligence services generally; the same investigation distinguished Project Nimbus from a more sensitive, still unsigned defence-ministry tender known as Project Sirius, which it described as a planned air-gapped security cloud for the IDF and the ministry.

No Tech for Apartheid and worker firings

Opposition among Google and Amazon staff began soon after the contract was announced. +972 Magazine wrote that within months hundreds of workers at both companies had signed an open letter calling on them to cut ties with the Israeli military, and that protests grew after 7 October 2023 under the banner of No Tech for Apartheid, a worker-led campaign of Google and Amazon employees. The campaign's website describes it as "a worker-led campaign of Google and Amazon workers organizing against the companies' $1B Project Nimbus cloud computing contract with the Israeli government and military." The campaign has said the contract will make it "easier for the Israeli government to surveil Palestinians and force them off their land", a claim reported by The Guardian.

On 16 April 2024 workers organised by the campaign held sit-in protests at Google offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California. The Guardian reported that police were called and that some protesters, referred to by the campaign as the "Nimbus Nine", were arrested. Google first said it had fired 28 employees, then fired more than 20 others, bringing the total to more than 50. The company said that physically impeding other employees' work and preventing them from accessing facilities was a "clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior." The campaign called the dismissals a "flagrant act of retaliation" and said some of those fired had not taken part in the sit-ins.

See also

• Google
• Amazon Web Services
• Israel Defense Forces
• Unit 8200
• Dror Kashti
• Sweet Security
• No Tech for Apartheid
• Israel Aerospace Industries
• Rafael Advanced Defense Systems
• Cyber and tech firms founded by ex Unit 8200 or occupation forces veterans

External links

• Government Procurement Administration: Nimbus Tender
• Google Cloud announcement, 25 May 2021
• AWS announcement, 11 June 2021
• No Tech for Apartheid