On April 16, 2024, Google and Amazon workers joined outside activists in protests at company facilities in Seattle, New York and Sunnyvale, California. They demanded that the companies cancel Project Nimbus, a cloud-services agreement with the Israeli government commonly valued at about $1.2 billion. The protests were real; the unresolved question is how far public evidence goes in proving that Nimbus systems were used in particular military operations in Gaza.
What happened on April 16, 2024?
The demonstrations were organized or supported by the No Tech for Apartheid campaign. About 50 people gathered outside Google’s Seattle office for roughly two hours, while sit-ins took place at Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian’s Sunnyvale office and in a common area at a Google facility in New York. Google and Amazon employees participated alongside outside activists. Reports also described related demonstrations in other cities. Separate Seattle-area protest activity the previous day resulted in arrests.
The immediate demand was cancellation of Project Nimbus. Protesters said supplying cloud infrastructure to the Israeli government made the companies participants in state surveillance and military power during the war in Gaza, which followed Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack and Israel’s subsequent campaign in Gaza.
GeekWire, WIRED and the Los Angeles Times reported on the locations and actions.
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What Project Nimbus is—and is not
Project Nimbus is a cloud-computing and data-infrastructure program awarded in 2021 to Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services. Its reported value is about $1.2 billion; some campaign materials use $1.22 billion. The program is intended to provide Israeli government bodies with locally hosted cloud infrastructure and services for storing and processing data, computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
It is not publicly documented as one discrete weapons system. The formal contract description concerns general-purpose cloud services, while the Israeli government and associated agencies are the customers. An AWS overview of the Nimbus agreement and Israeli government material at gov.il describe the government cloud program.
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Why workers opposed the contract
Workers and campaigners treated Nimbus as a human-rights, labor-rights and technology-accountability issue. The No Tech for Apartheid campaign alleged that the infrastructure could enable surveillance and unlawful data collection against Palestinians. Their broader argument was that a provider does not need to build a weapon for its storage, networking, data-processing and AI services to support intelligence or military operations.
The main objections
- Dual-use infrastructure: The same compute, storage and analytics tools can support civilian administration or defense activity.
- Government and military customers: Protesters objected to Israeli government bodies—and potentially defense institutions—being beneficiaries of the companies’ systems.
- AI concerns: They feared machine-learning capacity could be incorporated into military or intelligence workflows, while acknowledging that the public record did not identify every workload.
- Limited transparency: They argued that outside observers and employees could not see enough of the contract or downstream controls to assess use.
- Corporate responsibility: They questioned whether terms of service and contractual restrictions can prevent harmful use once infrastructure is available to a government.
What the public evidence establishes
| Question | Best-supported answer |
|---|---|
| Does Project Nimbus exist? | Yes. It was awarded in 2021. |
| Are Google Cloud and AWS involved? | Yes; they are the two reported technology providers. |
| Is the Israeli government a customer? | Yes. Nimbus is a government cloud program. |
| Is the defense establishment linked to the program? | Public reporting and government-related documents connect the broader program to the Ministry of Defense and the Israel Defense Forces, but the precise scope of individual workloads is not public. |
| Does a public document prove Google Cloud selected bombing targets? | No. TIME reported that a contract it reviewed linked Google to Israel’s Ministry of Defense but did not specify military applications or show targeting use. |
| Were Google protesters dismissed? | Google initially reported or was reported to have fired 28 employees after the sit-ins; later totals were disputed and reported higher. |
| Did Amazon impose the same dismissals? | That was not established in event coverage. |
TIME’s contract reporting is important because it separates a documented relationship with the Ministry of Defense from proof of operational use in attacks. A cloud provider’s infrastructure being available to a defense ministry does not, by itself, establish that it supported a particular strike.
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How Google and Amazon responded
Google said Nimbus was intended for commercial cloud workloads used by Israeli government ministries and excluded highly sensitive, classified or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence. The company said customers were subject to its terms of service and other policies.
Google also said the sit-ins violated workplace rules and disrupted operations. The company fired employees after the demonstrations, making the labor dispute part of the controversy.
Amazon
Amazon employees participated in the campaign, but available reporting does not show an equivalent Amazon firing wave tied to these demonstrations. The available coverage also did not include a substantive public Amazon explanation of its role in Nimbus or alleged services to the Israel Defense Forces. Google and Amazon therefore should not be described as having taken identical disciplinary or communications actions.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How many Google workers were fired?
Google announced or was reported to have dismissed 28 employees on April 17–18, immediately after the April 16 sit-ins. Later updates produced different totals. The worker campaign said additional dismissals brought the number to approximately 50; an Associated Press report described another round in which activists said 30 workers were fired. These figures came from different updates and parties and should not be treated as one independently settled count.
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Google’s position was that employees violated conduct or workplace rules. Workers and organizers characterized the dismissals as retaliation for political speech and organizing, and said some people fired had not directly participated. The Guardian, Axios and Associated Press documented different stages of the dispute.
What remains unknown
- Which Israeli agencies used which Nimbus services and workloads.
- Whether any specific Nimbus workload supported military targeting, intelligence analysis or a named operation in Gaza.
- What contractual auditing, access controls and enforcement mechanisms applied to every government customer.
- Whether Google or Amazon conducted independent human-rights due diligence that was made public.
- The contract’s operational scope and status after the 2024 protests.
Public reporting does not establish that Google or Amazon cloud systems directly selected or authorized specific attacks. It also does not prove that no government or defense-related use occurred. The evidence supports a narrower conclusion: Nimbus is a real, large government cloud program, its potential dual-use consequences are contested, and the public record does not disclose enough technical detail to resolve every claim.
Why the distinction matters
The dispute combines three questions that are often blurred together:
- What the contract formally provides: general-purpose cloud infrastructure and related services for Israeli government bodies.
- What the companies say it excludes: Google says highly sensitive, classified and military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence are outside Nimbus.
- What workers and critics infer: that cloud access can still enable surveillance, intelligence, data processing or AI-assisted military activity even without a named weapons application.
Keeping those categories separate avoids two unsupported conclusions: that Nimbus was simply a weapons contract, or that company assurances conclusively rule out every defense-related use. The central accountability question is whether supplying dual-use infrastructure to a government engaged in war creates responsibility for downstream use, and what level of transparency and control a provider owes the public.
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Sources and further reading
- SEC-filed shareholder material discussing Nimbus and customer due diligence
- TIME on worker concerns and the contract
- The Washington Post on Google’s dismissals
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