Nearly 400 Google and Amazon workers in Israel have demanded that their employers cut ties with Project Nimbus, an initiative backed by the state’s far-right government to establish secure local cloud computing sites across the country.
In an open letter published in the British newspaper The Guardian, 90 Google and 300 Amazon employees, writing anonymously, condemned the US cloud computing giants’ decision to “sell dangerous technology to the Israeli military and government.” “The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians,” the Google and Amazon workers said in a post published in The Guardian.
Project Nimbus was awarded to Google and Amazon last April, beating out bids on the project from Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM. The Nimbus Project is intended to provide a comprehensive, in-depth cloud services solution for the government, the national defense system, and other bodies in the Israeli economy. The tech giants will establish cloud-based data centers in a plan to move a majority of the government’s IT infrastructure to cloud-based servers at an initial investment of NIS 4 billion.
Among the agencies set to be supported is the Israeli military, as well as the Israel Land Authority, which Human Rights Watch has accused of discriminatory policies designed to segregate Palestinians in occupied West Bank.
