Project Nimbus: How Tech Giants Traded Ethics for Business in Israel

In 2021, Google and Amazon inked a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government, a deal to provide Netanyahu’s administration and its military with advanced cloud computing and AI services that would come to haunt both companies. To secure the lucrative Project Nimbus contract, the tech giants agreed to disregard their own terms of service and sidestep legal orders by tipping Israel off if a foreign court demands its data, a stunning departure from industry norms.

The contract’s stipulations are unprecedented. Google and Amazon are prohibited from restricting how Israel uses their products, even if this use breaches their terms of service. Should either company attempt to pull the plug, they face severe financial penalties and potential litigation. This clause reportedly helped them win the contract over Microsoft, which refused to accept similar terms.

Buried in leaked Israeli Finance Ministry documents is a provision that reads like something from a spy thriller: a secret payment system designed to circumvent legal disclosure requirements. If a U.S. court orders Google or Amazon to hand over Israeli data, the companies must send Israel 1,000 shekels, matching the country’s +1 dialing code. A request from Denmark? 4,500 shekels, corresponding to +45. And if legal restrictions explicitly bar any hint about the data request’s origin, the payment jumps to 100,000 shekels.

This “winking mechanism,” as sources familiar with the negotiations describe it, represents just one of the extraordinary concessions Google and Amazon made to secure Project Nimbus. The leaked documents reveal that the tech giants agreed to terms they had never accepted before: Not only can they not restrict how Israel uses their products, even if that use violates their own terms of service, but they also cannot pull out, even under public pressure. In other words, they crucially surrendered their ability to enforce the ethical guidelines they so publicly tout.

Israeli officials drafted these provisions years before October 7, anticipating the very scenario now unfolding in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and around the World, with a drastic increase in international legal scrutiny over the use of American technology in military operations against Palestinians. Their foresight appears prescient: while Microsoft recently terminated its contract with the Israeli military after discovering it was being used to store surveillance data on Palestinian civilians, Google and Amazon remain contractually bound, their hands tied by clauses they agreed to in pursuit of profit.

As Israel’s military operations in Gaza intensified, so too did internal dissent. Google and Amazon have faced growing criticism from employees and investors over the role Nimbus has played in Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza, which numerous human rights organizations and a UN commission of inquiry have labeled a genocide. In December 2023, 1,700 Amazon employees petitioned CEO Andy Jassy, warning that the company was “bolstering the artificial intelligence and surveillance capabilities of the Israeli military used to repress Palestinian activists and impose a brutal siege on Gaza”.

The pushback reached a boiling point in spring 2024, when a Google Cloud engineer shouted “I refuse to build technology that empowers genocide” at a company event, prompting his immediate dismissal. Weeks later, dozens of employees staged sit-ins at Google’s New York and Sunnyvale headquarters, resulting in 28 terminations, a number that would eventually climb to 50 as the company cracked down on dissent.

A joint investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian has uncovered that Google and Amazon agreed to unusual “controls” imposed by Israel as part of the deal, anticipating potential legal disputes regarding the technology’s application in the occupied West Bank and Gaza…

Yuval Abraham reports for +972 Magazine…

‘No restrictions’ and a secret ‘wink’: Inside Israel’s deal with Google, Amazon

To secure the lucrative Project Nimbus contract, the tech giants agreed to disregard their own terms of service and sidestep legal orders by tipping Israel off if a foreign court demands its data, a joint investigation reveals.

In 2021, Google and Amazon signed a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government to provide it with advanced cloud computing and AI services — tools that were used during Israel’s two-year onslaught on the Gaza Strip. Details of the lucrative contract, known as Project Nimbus, were kept under wraps.

But an investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian can now reveal that Google and Amazon submitted to highly unorthodox “controls” that Israel inserted into the deal, in anticipation of legal challenges over its use of the technology in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Leaked Israeli Finance Ministry documents obtained by The Guardian — including a finalized version of the contract — and sources familiar with the negotiations reveal two stringent demands that Israel imposed on the tech giants as part of the deal. The first prohibits Google and Amazon from restricting how Israel uses their products, even if this use breaches their terms of service. The second obliges the companies to secretly notify Israel if a foreign court orders them to hand over the country’s data stored on their cloud platforms, effectively sidestepping their legal obligations.

Running for an initial seven years with the possibility of extension, Project Nimbus was designed to enable Israel to transfer vast quantities of data belonging to its government agencies, security services, and military units onto the two companies’ cloud servers: Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. But even two years before October 7, Israeli officials drafting the contract had already anticipated the potential for legal cases to be brought against Google and Amazon regarding the use of their technology in the occupied territories.

One scenario that particularly concerned officials was if the companies were ordered by a court in one of their countries of operation to hand over Israel’s data to police, prosecutors, or security agencies to assist with an investigation — if, for example, Israel’s use of their products was linked to human rights abuses against Palestinians.

The CLOUD Act (2018) allows American law enforcement agencies to compel U.S.-based cloud providers to hand over data, even if it is stored on servers abroad; in the European Union, due diligence laws can require companies to identify and address human rights violations in their global supply chains, and courts may intervene if these obligations are not met.

Crucially, companies receiving an order to hand over data are often gagged by the court or law enforcement agency from disclosing details of the request to the affected customer. To address this perceived vulnerability, the documents reveal, Israeli officials demanded a clause in the contract requiring the companies to covertly warn Israel if ever they were forced to surrender its data but were prohibited by law from revealing this fact.

According to The Guardian, this signaling is carried out through a secret code — part of an arrangement that would become known as the “winking mechanism,” but referred to in the contract as “special compensation” — by which the companies are obliged to send the Israeli government four-digit payments in Israeli shekels (NIS) corresponding to the relevant country’s international dialing code followed by zeros.

For example, if Google or Amazon were compelled to share data with U.S. authorities (dialing code +1) and were barred from revealing that action by a U.S. court, they would transfer NIS 1,000 to Israel. If a similar request were to occur in Italy (dialing code +39), they would instead send NIS 3,900. The contract states that these payments must be made “within 24 hours of the information being transferred.”

IMAGE: Thousands of people protest Google’s contract with Israel that provides facial recognition and other technologies, amid the Gaza war, outside Google’s offices in San Francisco, Thursday, December 14, 2023. (Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)

If Google or Amazon conclude that the terms of a gag order prevent them from even signaling which country has received the data, there is a backstop: They must pay the Israeli government NIS 100,000 ($30,000).

Legal experts, including several former U.S. prosecutors, described this arrangement to The Guardian as highly unusual, explaining that the coded messages could violate the companies’ legal obligations in the United States to keep a subpoena secret. “It seems awfully cute and something that if the U.S. government or, more to the point, a court were to understand, I don’t think they would be particularly sympathetic,” one former U.S. government lawyer said.

Several other experts described the mechanism as a “clever” workaround that could comply with the letter of the law but not its spirit.

Israeli officials appear to have acknowledged this. According to the documents, they noted that their demands as to how Google and Amazon should respond to a U.S.-issued order “might collide” with U.S. law, and the companies would have to make a choice between “violating the contract or violating their legal obligations.”

Neither Google nor Amazon responded to questions about whether they had used the secret code since the Nimbus contract came into effect.

“We have a rigorous global process for responding to lawful and binding orders for requests related to customer data,” Amazon’s spokesperson said. “We do not have any processes in place to circumvent our confidentiality obligations on lawfully binding orders.”

A Google spokesperson said it was “false” to “imply that we somehow were involved in illegal activity, which is absurd.” The spokesperson added: “The idea that we would evade our legal obligations to the U.S. government as a U.S. company, or in any other country, is categorically wrong.”

A spokesperson for Israel’s Finance Ministry said: “The article’s insinuation that Israel compels companies to breach the law is baseless.”

‘Acceptable use’

According to the leaked documents and sources with knowledge of internal discussions, Israeli officials were also concerned that access to Google or Amazon’s cloud services could be restricted or cut off altogether — either as a result of a foreign court ruling, or a unilateral decision by the companies themselves in response to employee or shareholder pressure.

The officials were especially worried that activists and human rights organizations might leverage laws in certain European countries to sue the companies and push for an end to their business ties with Israel, particularly if their products were linked to human rights violations.

IMAGE: Google and Amazon workers protest against their companies’ collaboration with the Israeli military at the annual Amazon Web Services summit in New York, July 26, 2023. (X/No Tech For Apartheid)

Last month, after +972, Local Call, and The Guardian revealed that Israel had violated Microsoft’s terms of service by using its cloud platform to store a vast trove of intercepted phone calls made by Palestinians, the tech giant revoked the Israeli military’s access to some of its products.

In contrast, the leaked documents state that the Nimbus contract specifically prohibits Google and Amazon from imposing similar sanctions on Israel, even if company policies change or if Israel’s use of the technology violates their terms of service. Doing so, according to the documents, would not only trigger legal action for breach of contract but also incur heavy financial penalties.

The two companies’ willingness to accept these conditions was reportedly part of the reason why they won the Nimbus contract over Microsoft, whose relationship with Israel’s government and military is governed by separate contracts. Indeed, intelligence sources told The Guardian that Israel planned to move its surveillance trove from Microsoft’s cloud to Amazon’s platform after the former blocked its access.

Google was seemingly aware that it would be largely giving up control over how Israel would use its technology, despite repeatedly claiming that its products are used only by Israeli government ministries that “agree to comply with our terms of service and acceptable use policy.”

The Intercept reported last year that Nimbus is governed by an “adjusted” set of policies agreed between Google and Israel, rather than the company’s general cloud computing terms of service policy. The publication cited a leaked email by a Google lawyer warning that if the company won the deal, it “will need to accept a non negotiable contract on terms favourable to the government.”

Both tech companies’ “acceptable use” policies state that their cloud platforms should not be used to violate the legal rights of others, nor should they be used to engage in or encourage activities that cause “serious harm” to people. But a source familiar with the drafting of the contract said it makes clear there can be “no restrictions” on the kind of data stored on Google and Amazon’s cloud platforms.

An analysis of the deal by Israel’s Finance Ministry states that the Nimbus contract permits Israel to “make use of any service” at will — so long as in doing so it does not breach Israeli law, infringe on copyright, or resell the companies’ technology. The terms of the deal 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 government memo circulated several months after the deal was signed stated that the fact the cloud providers had agreed to “subordinate” their own terms of service to those of the contract indicates “they understand the sensitivities of the Israeli government and are willing to accept our requirements.”

Continue reading this report here…

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Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/10/30/project-nimbus-how-tech-giants-shifted-principles-for-business-in-israel/