That still appears to include the IDF. WIRED identified several Israeli government statements and documents published since 2022 that confirm the IDF’s continued involvement in Project Nimbus, though they provide no details about the tools and capabilities it is using.
For example, a government document published on June 15, 2022, outlining the scope of the project states: “The Ministry of Defense and the IDF” will receive a special “digital marketplace” with 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, revealing some of the specific Google technologies the contract provided access to. They included AI capabilities such as facial detection, object tracking, sentiment analysis, and other complex tasks.
Official government pages, old and new, in both Hebrew and English, contain the same standard description of Project Nimbus. It calls the contract “a multi-year, broad-based 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 press release, a cloud strategy document from 2022, and a press release from January 2023.
A version of the statement is also posted in a January 2023 Amazon guidance document on Nimbus and on the events page for the 2024 “Nimbus Summit,” a private event bringing together tech workers from Amazon, Google and dozens of other companies that have played a role in modernizing Israel’s tech infrastructure in recent years.
Narrow tyres
Social media posts from Israeli officials, Amazon and Google employees suggest that the country's military remains closely involved with Project Nimbus and the two US cloud companies working on it.
In June 2023, Omri Nezer, head of the technology infrastructure unit at the Israeli Government Procurement Administration, posted a summary of a cloud conference held by the Israeli government on LinkedIn. He wrote that the goal was to bring together people from “different government offices within 'Project Nimbus.'”
Nezer’s post mentions a panel at the conference that will include “a representative from the IDF” and the head of engineering IT for Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, a defense company originally founded as a research and development firm for the Israeli military. The Intercept reported last month that Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries, both Israeli government-backed weapons manufacturers, are “obligated customers” of Google and Amazon through Project Nimbus. Amazon spokesperson Duncan Neasham told WIRED that Rafael “is not obligated to use AWS or Google solely for cloud services” and “may use the services of other cloud providers as well.”
National security services remain a key 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 hosted for defense customers. “We had attendees from every security organization in Israel,” Holzman wrote, without specifying which services. “AWS is particularly focused on the National Security (NatSec) community, which has its own unique needs and requirements.”
