Google and Amazon employees reject Project Nimbus

Google and Amazon employees reject Project Nimbus

San Francisco, Sept. 11, 2022

Employees of Google and Amazon protested over the weekend against Project Nimbus. This is a $1.2 billion cloud contract awarded to both companies to provide AI and other technological tools to the Israeli government and military.

Employees, along with human rights activists, have expressed concern that the tools will be used to support Israel’s military occupation of Palestine.

Part of the contract includes numerous AI/ML tools that will be made available through Google Cloud. The new cloud can provide the Israeli government with automatic image categorization, facial recognition, object tracking and so-called „sentiment analysis“ to detect human emotions.

Demonstrations by opponents were held Thursday at Google offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Durham, North Carolina.

Opponents of the project argue Nimbus could violate the human rights of Palestinians because of its capabilities, and alsos support Israel’s surveillance of people and data storage .

A statement from Google’s chief executive said the contract covers workloads that run on its commercial platform for Israel’s finance, health and other ministries.

The company claims the contract has been misrepresented and does not target „highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence agencies.“