Statement from the No Tech For Apartheid campaign on bombshell investigation confirming that Project Nimbus requires Israeli weapons manufacturers to run on Amazon and Google’s cloud services

This afternoon’s bombshell reporting from The Intercept confirms that despite Google’s continued insistence that Project Nimbus is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services,” both Google and Amazon are directly colluding with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).

Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon’s $1.2B cloud contract with Israel, requires Israeli weapons manufacturers including Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems to run on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud — effectively creating a one-stop shop for genocide on the cloud.

According to The Intercept’s reporting, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems is a manufacturer of the “Spike” missile, which analysts suspect Israel has weaponized against Palestinians, leaving “cube-shaped tungsten shrapnel wounds,” since as early as 2009. It has been deployed as recently as last month, during Israel’s drone-facilitated killing of seven World Central Kitchen humanitarian workers.

Google and Amazon are also collaborating with U.S. defense contractors like Palantir to migrate Israel’s warfighting capabilities onto their cloud services. Recent reporting in The Nation found the Israeli military uses Palantir technology to “feed Israel’s killing machine in Gaza.”

What’s more, Israel’s settlement division, a ‘quasi-governmental body tasked with expanding Israel’s illegal colonies in the West Bank,’ is a mandatory Nimbus customer. Israel Aerospace Industries’ subsidiary, Elta, manufactures a robot bulldozer the Israeli military is using to raze down buildings in Gaza.

With this reporting, our understanding of the relationship between Google and Amazon and the Israeli military and apartheid apparatus has crystallized. What we see is profit-greedy corporations looking to turn a buck by any means necessary, including by directly working with a genocidal state.

This news clearly reveals even more clearly why Google fired 50 of its own workers last week. Google executives know the depth of their company’s complicity in genocide, war crimes, and illegal settlement expansion. They are terrified of workers organizing for Palestine, around the terms and conditions of their labor, and around workplace conditions relating to Nimbus. They are terrified of worker power because it threatens the corporation’s burgeoning war profiteering business model.

As artificial intelligence becomes the backbone for state violence, Google, Amazon, and other Silicon Valley titans are vying to become the infrastructure for militaries, police, ICE, and other violent forces around the world. They are the new war profiteers — full stop.

With this new reporting, there is no room left for doubt: Google and Amazon are turbocharging the Israeli military’s killing machine. Google and Amazon executives are genocide profiteers with blood on their hands.

Let us be clear: Nothing — no amount of mass retaliation or firings — will stop Google and Amazon workers from organizing against Project Nimbus until it is dropped.