The Hidden Ties Between Google and Amazon’s Project Nimbus and Israel’s Military

That appears to still include the IDF. WIRED identified several Israeli government statements and documents published since 2022 that confirm the IDF’s continued involvement with Project Nimbus, although they do not provide details of the tools and capabilities it uses.

For instance, a government document published on June 15, 2022, that outlines the scope of the project, says “The Ministry of Defense and the IDF” will get a dedicated “digital marketplace” of services they can access under Project Nimbus.

In July 2022, The Intercept also reported on training documents and videos provided to Nimbus users in the Israeli government that revealed some of the specific Google technologies the contract provided access to. They included AI capabilities such as face detection, object tracking, sentiment analysis, and other complex tasks.

Official government pages old and new, both in Hebrew and English, feature the same boilerplate description of Project Nimbus. It calls the contract “a multiyear and wide-ranging flagship project, led by the Government Procurement Administration in the Accountant General’s Division in the Ministry of Treasury together with the National Digital Unit, the Legal Bureau in the Ministry of Finance, the National Cyber Unit, the Budget Division, the Ministry of Defense and the IDF.” The statement appears on one of the main government pages about Project Nimbus, an undated news release, a 2022 cloud strategy document, and a press release from January 2023.

A version of the statement has also been posted in an Amazon guidance document about Nimbus from January 2023, and on the event page for the 2024 “Nimbus Summit,” a privately run event that brings together tech workers from Amazon, Google, and the dozens of other companies that have played some hand in modernizing Israel’s tech infrastructure in recent years.

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Social media posts by Israeli officials, Amazon employees, and Google employees suggest the country’s military remains closely involved with Project Nimbus—and the two US cloud companies working on it.

In June 2023, Omri Nezer, the head of the technology infrastructure unit at the Israeli Government Procurement Administration, posted a recap of a cloud conference held by the Israeli government to LinkedIn. He wrote that it was meant to bring together people from “different government offices within ‘Project Nimbus.’”

Nezer’s post mentions a panel at the conference that featured “an IDF representative” and the head of engineering IT for Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, a defense company originally created as a research and development company for the Israeli military. The Intercept reported last month that Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries, both Israeli government-backed weapons manufacturers, are “obligatory customers” of Google and Amazon through Project Nimbus. Amazon spokesperson Duncan Neasham tells WIRED that Rafael is “not required to use AWS or Google only for cloud services” and can “also use other cloud providers’ services.”

National security agencies remain an important part of Project Nimbus. In a 2023 LinkedIn post tagged #nimbus, Omri Holzman, defense team lead at Amazon Web Services, summarized a recent event AWS put on for defense customers. “We had attendees from each security organization in Israel,” Holzman wrote, without specifying which agencies. “AWS puts a lot of focus on the National Security (NatSec) community which has its unique needs and requirements.”