That seems to nonetheless embody the IDF. WIRED recognized a number of Israeli authorities statements and paperwork printed since 2022 that affirm the IDF’s continued involvement with Venture Nimbus, though they don’t present particulars of the instruments and capabilities it makes use of.
For example, a authorities doc published on June 15, 2022, that outlines the scope of the mission, says “The Ministry of Protection and the IDF” will get a devoted “digital market” of providers they’ll entry underneath Venture Nimbus.
In July 2022, The Intercept additionally reported on training documents and movies supplied to Nimbus customers within the Israeli authorities that exposed among the particular Google applied sciences the contract supplied entry to. They included AI capabilities reminiscent of face detection, object monitoring, sentiment evaluation, and different advanced duties.
Official authorities pages outdated and new, each in Hebrew and English, function the identical boilerplate description of Venture Nimbus. It calls the contract “a multiyear and wide-ranging flagship mission, led by the Authorities Procurement Administration within the Accountant Common’s Division within the Ministry of Treasury along with the Nationwide Digital Unit, the Authorized Bureau within the Ministry of Finance, the Nationwide Cyber Unit, the Finances Division, the Ministry of Protection and the IDF.” The assertion seems on one of many main government pages about Project Nimbus, an undated news release, a 2022 cloud strategy document, and a press release from January 2023.
A model of the assertion has additionally been posted in an Amazon guidance document about Nimbus from January 2023, and on the event page for the 2024 “Nimbus Summit,” a privately run occasion that brings collectively tech staff from Amazon, Google, and the handfuls of different firms which have performed some hand in modernizing Israel’s tech infrastructure in recent times.
Shut Ties
Social media posts by Israeli officers, Amazon workers, and Google workers recommend the nation’s army stays carefully concerned with Venture Nimbus—and the 2 US cloud firms engaged on it.
In June 2023, Omri Nezer, the pinnacle of the know-how infrastructure unit on the Israeli Authorities Procurement Administration, posted a recap of a cloud convention held by the Israeli authorities to LinkedIn. He wrote that it was meant to carry collectively folks from “totally different authorities workplaces inside ‘Venture Nimbus.’”
Nezer’s put up mentions a panel on the convention that featured “an IDF consultant” and the pinnacle of engineering IT for Rafael Superior Protection Techniques, a protection firm initially created as a analysis and improvement firm for the Israeli army. The Intercept reported last month that Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries, each Israeli government-backed weapons producers, are “compulsory prospects” of Google and Amazon by way of Venture Nimbus. Amazon spokesperson Duncan Neasham tells WIRED that Rafael is “not required to make use of AWS or Google just for cloud providers” and might “additionally use different cloud suppliers’ providers.”
Nationwide safety businesses stay an vital a part of Venture Nimbus. In a 2023 LinkedIn post tagged #nimbus, Omri Holzman, protection crew lead at Amazon Net Companies, summarized a current occasion AWS placed on for protection prospects. “We had attendees from every safety group in Israel,” Holzman wrote, with out specifying which businesses. “AWS places quite a lot of concentrate on the Nationwide Safety (NatSec) neighborhood which has its distinctive wants and necessities.”
