Project Nimbus: Why 1,200 students and tech workers have pledged not to join Google, Amazon

BREAKING—DOZENS OF @GOOGLE WORKERS LEAD HISTORIC COAST TO COAST-INS AT @GOOGLECLOUD CEO THOMAS KURIAN’S OFFICE IN SUNNYVALE & @GOOGLE’s NYC 10TH FLOOR COMMONS. They refuse to leave until @google stops powering the genocide in Gaza

LIVESTREAM: https://t.co/uUiPbr3oDz pic.twitter.com/vCkInh0769

— No Tech For Apartheid (@NoTechApartheid) April 16, 2024

What is Project Nimbus?

The Israeli government describes Project Nimbus as a “multi-year project, intended to give a comprehensive, in-depth response to the provision of public cloud services for government ministries, auxiliary units and related bodies.”

It says that there is “great value in having a public cloud service within the borders of the State of Israel… This service will operate in a configuration that will preserve the sovereignty of information and prevent leakage of sensitive information outside the borders of the country”.

Google and Amazon jointly won the bid for Israel’s Project Nimbus in April 2021. Google says that the agreement will “deliver cloud services to all government entities from across the state, including ministries, authorities, and government-owned companies.”

Why are some tech workers and students against Project Nimbus?

Critics of Project Nimbus say that it enables Israeli surveillance on Palestinians, and occupation of their land.

In October 2021, “anonymous” Google and Amazon workers wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian, demanding that their employers “pull out of Project Nimbus and cut all ties with the Israeli military”.

“We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court,” they wrote.

This language is similar to the one employed in the recent pledge, organised by No Tech for Apartheid, an online activism platform run in collaboration between American Muslim grasroots organisation M Power Change, and anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace.

“Palestinians are already harmed by Israeli surveillance and violence. By expanding public cloud computing capacity and providing their state of the art technology to the Israeli occupation’s government and military, Amazon and Google are helping to make Israeli apartheid more efficient, more violent, and even deadlier for Palestinians,” the pledge reads.

How exactly does Project Nimbus allegedly harm Palestinians?

An investigation by The Intercept in 2022 found that Google was “offering advanced artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities to the Israeli government” through Project Nimbus.

The investigation reviewed training documents and videos obtained through a publicly accessible educational portal intended for Nimbus users to claim that “Google is providing the Israeli government with the full suite of machine-learning and AI tools available through Google Cloud Platform”. The new cloud, the investigation revealed, could give “Israel capabilities for facial detection, automated image categorisation, object tracking, and even sentiment analysis that claims to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and writing”.

In another investigation in May this year, The Intercept obtained a 63-page Israeli government procurement document, which claimed that two of Israel’s leading state-owned weapons manufacturers — Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems — were required to use Amazon and Google for cloud computing needs.

The investigation also listed that the cloud customers include state entities like the Bank of Israel, the Israel Airports Authority, and the Settlement Division, which facilitates Israeli settlement on Palestinian land.

How have Google and Amazon responded?

In a statement, Google said: “We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education. Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

Amazon too spoke on similar lines. A spokesperson told Time Magazine that the company “is focused on making the benefits of our world-leading cloud technology available to all our customers, wherever they are located”. They added that the company is supporting employees affected by the war, and working with humanitarian agencies.

In April, Google workers associated with No Tech for Apartheid held sit-in protests against Project Nimbus in the company’s offices in Silicon Valley, New York City and Seattle. Subsequently, Google fired 28 employees.