Amazon.com is one of the largest companies in the world, headquartered in Seattle, that focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital media streaming, and artificial intelligence. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s largest provider of cloud storage services, controlling almost one-third of the global market.
Amazon’s government-facing cloud infrastructure service, AWS GovCloud, is the largest cloud provider for the U.S. government. As of 2024, it serves 7,500 government agencies.
Powering the Israeli Military and Violations of Palestinian Rights
Since 2021, AWS, alongside Google Cloud Platform, has developed the main cloud infrastructure platform for the Israeli government. Dubbed Project Nimbus, this is one of the largest technology projects in Israel’s history.
The Nimbus Project serves all branches and units of the Israeli government, including the Israeli military, which played a leading role in designing the tender for the contract and selecting the winning bids.
Initially, the Nimbus public cloud infrastructure was not designed to serve the military’s combat-facing or classified intelligence systems. For that purpose, the military has its own private internal cloud system, which connects all its branches—Army, Air Force, Navy, Intelligence—“from the command centers to the combat troops.” Among many systems, this internal cloud hosts the military’s massive “target bank,” with tens of thousands of targets that get updated in real time. Internally referred to as the Operational Cloud, it was developed in-house by the military’s information technology (IT) unit—the Center of Computing and Information Systems (MAMRAM)—using IBM’s OpenShift platform. The unit describes its Operational Cloud as “a weapon for all intents and purposes.”
While Nimbus was not initially designed for this purpose, the Israeli military started using its infrastructure to support and augment the capabilities of its Operational Cloud during its 2023–2024 war on the Gaza Strip. In late October 2023, preparations for the large-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip required unprecedented computing power, and the Operational Cloud became overloaded. MAMRAM took several steps to address this problem, including using “the public cloud providers, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft,” as the commander of the IT unit revealed in July 2024.
Of these three companies, the Israeli military’s relationship with Amazon is the closest, according to +972 Magazine. AWS “provides Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate with a server farm which is used to store masses of intelligence information,” which allows the military “to have ‘endless storage’ for holding intelligence on almost ‘everyone’ in Gaza,” +972 Magazine reported. This information has reportedly “helped on rare occasions to confirm aerial assassination strikes in Gaza — strikes that would have also killed and harmed Palestinian civilians.”
This potentially implicates Amazon, along with Google and Microsoft, in the mass killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them unarmed civilians, using multiple AI systems (The Gospel, Lavender, and Where's Daddy?) that the military developed to generate targets and hit them at unprecedented scale with minimal human intervention.
More Information About the Nimbus Cloud Platform
Amazon and Google were selected for the Nimbus Project in April 2021 and are splitting the $1.2 billion contract. As part of the contract, the two companies have also committed to “reciprocal procurement and industrial cooperation in Israel at the rate of 20% of the contract value.” In August 2023, Amazon announced that it would be investing $7.2 billion through 2037 to set up a cloud-based regional data center in Israel.
In a separate tender, Israel contracted consulting firm Somekh Chaikin-KPMG, an affiliate of the Anglo-Dutch multinational KPMG, to establish a government cloud migration strategy. Dozens of other Israeli companies are involved in multiple projects to gradually migrate the government’s databases and systems to the Nimbus platform.
Knowing from the start that this project is controversial and would draw negative public attention to the companies involved in it, the Israeli government built clauses into the contract to prevent these companies from withdrawing. A lawyer for the Israeli government said the tender was designed to prevent the companies from shutting down services altogether or “denying services to particular government entities.”
Other government entities that use Nimbus and directly administer Israel’s policies of apartheid and persecution include the Israeli Security Agency (Shabak/"Shin Bet"), Police, Prison Service, and land and water authorities. Israel’s two large state-owned weapons manufacturers, Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael, are also Nimbus users.
The list of Nimbus users also includes the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization, which works to expand Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights. Israeli cities and local governments also have access to the Nimbus platform, meaning that it could directly serve Israel’s illegal settlements.
In October 2021, a few months after Amazon and Google won the tender, hundreds of employees published a joint statement calling on the two companies to pull out of the project. The statement read, in part, “We envision a future where technology brings people together and makes life better for everyone. To build that brighter future, the companies we work for need to stop contracting with any and all militarized organizations in the US and beyond.”
Project Nimbus is not Amazon’s first involvement in human rights violations as part of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The company’s online retail platform and its Whole Foods brick-and-mortar stores carry many products that are manufactured in Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. This includes Dead Sea cosmetics made by Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories, tahini products made by Ahdut/Achva, mounting systems made by Barkan, and many more.
In 2019, Amazon started offering free shipping to Israel, including to its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The company did not offer a comparable service in the occupied Palestinian territory, including towns and villages located very close to illegal settlements. In March 2020, Amazon reversed its policy and started offering free delivery to customers in the occupied Palestinian territories.
To read more about Amazon's complicity, visit AFSC's Investigate Project.