Project Nimbus (Hebrew: פרויקט נימבוס) is a cloud computing project of the Israeli government and its military.[1][2][3][4] The Israeli Finance Ministry announced April 2021, that the contract is to provide "the government, the defense establishment, and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution."[1] Under the contract, the companies will establish local cloud sites that will "keep information within Israel's borders under strict security guidelines."[4] According to a Google spokesperson, the contract is for workloads related to "finance, healthcare, transportation, and education" and does not deal with highly sensitive or classified information.[5]
Although Project Nimbus' specific mission has not yet been revealed, Google Cloud Platform's AI tools could give the Israeli military and security services the capability for facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking & sentiment analysis – tools that have previously been used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection for border surveillance.[1]
Project Nimbus has four planned phases: the first is purchasing and constructing the cloud infrastructure, the second is crafting government policy for moving operations onto the cloud, the third is moving operations to the cloud, and the fourth is implementing and optimizing cloud operations.[6] Under a $1.2 billion contract, technology companies Google (Google Cloud Platform) and Amazon (Amazon Web Services) were selected to provide Israeli government agencies with cloud computing services, including artificial intelligence and machine learning.[7][1]
The terms Israel set for the project contractually forbid Amazon and Google from halting services due to boycott pressure.[8][9] The tech companies are also forbidden from denying service to any particular government entities.[9] A Google spokesperson said that all Google Cloud customers must abide by its terms of service which prohibit customers from using its services to violate people's legal rights or engage in violence.[5]