This appears to still include the IDF. WIRED has identified several Israeli government statements and documents published since 2022 that confirm the IDF’s continued involvement in Project Nimbus, though they do not provide details on the tools and capabilities it uses.
For example, a government document published on June 15, 2022which defines the scope of the project, says that the “Ministry of Defense and the Israel Defense Forces” will be provided with a dedicated “digital marketplace” of services that they can access as part of Project Nimbus.
In July 2022 Interception also informed about training documents and videos shared with Nimbus users within the Israeli government that revealed some of the specific Google technologies the deal provided access to. These included AI capabilities like facial detection, object tracking, sentiment analysis, and other complicated tasks.
Official government websites, elderly and fresh, in both Hebrew and English, feature the same boilerplate description of Project Nimbus. The contract is called a “multi-year, large-scale flagship project led by the Public Procurement Administration in the General Accountant’s Division at the Ministry of the Treasury, together with the National Digital Unit, the Legal Office at the Ministry of Finance, the National Cyber Unit, the Budget Division, the Ministry of Defense, and the Israel Defense Forces.” The statement appears on one of main government sites about Project Nimbussome undated press releaseAND 2022 Cloud Strategy Documentand January 2023 press release.
A version of the statement was also published in Amazon Guidelines Document about Nimbus from January 2023 and on Nimbus Summit 2024 event page a private event bringing together technology industry workers from Amazon, Google and dozens of other companies that have helped modernize Israel’s technology infrastructure in recent years.
Close ties
Social media posts by Israeli officials, Amazon employees and Google suggest the country’s military remains closely tied to Project Nimbus and the two American cloud computing companies working on it.
In June 2023, Omri Nezer, head of the technological infrastructure unit at the Public Procurement Administration of the Government of Israel, published a summary cloud conference organized by the Israeli government to LinkedIn. He wrote that it was intended to bring together people from “different government offices under the ‘Nimbus Project.’”
Nezer’s post mentioned a panel at the conference that included an “IDF representative” and the head of IT engineering at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, a defense company originally founded 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 arms manufacturers, are “must-have customers” of Google and Amazon through Project Nimbus. Amazon spokesman Duncan Neasham told WIRED that Rafael “does not have to use AWS or Google exclusively for cloud services” and can “use other cloud providers as well.”
National security agencies remain an crucial part of Project Nimbus. In LinkedIn Post in 2023 tagged #nimbus, Omri Holzman, defense team leader at Amazon Web Services, summed up a recent event AWS hosted for defense customers. “We had attendees from every security organization in Israel,” Holzman wrote, without specifying which agencies. “AWS places a strong emphasis on the national security (NatSec) community, which has its own unique needs and requirements.”