Google (Alphabet Inc.)

Alphabet reported revenue of $119.8 billion for the quarter, up 24% year on year, with Google Cloud revenue up 82% to $24.8 billion and a cloud backlog of $514 billion. It raised full-year capital expenditure guidance to $195–205 billion.

Around a hundred to two hundred of six thousand graduating students walked out of Stanford Stadium as the Alphabet chief executive began the commencement address, in a protest planned weeks in advance over Project Nimbus and Google's US immigration enforcement work. Protesters held an alternative ceremony in the Arboretum.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation asks Google and Amazon to conduct and publish independent human rights impact assessments, to disclose how they evaluate compliance with their own AI principles, and to commit to suspending services where there is a credible risk of serious human rights harm. It sets Google's public position, that Nimbus is 'not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads' and is governed by its acceptable use policies, against reporting that the Israeli government may use any service in the supplier's catalogue. Amazon ignored EFF's letters.

Google closed its purchase of the Israeli-founded cloud security company Wiz on 11 March 2026, its largest acquisition, after twelve months of regulatory review and unconditional clearances in the United States, the European Union, Australia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Türkiye. Wiz now sits inside Google Cloud alongside Project Nimbus.

The Palestinian BDS National Committee, the coalition that coordinates the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, renewed its call for pressure on Google and Amazon over Project Nimbus, asking institutions to end their contracts with them. It categorises Google as a pressure and divestment target rather than a consumer boycott target.

A former Google employee alleges, in a confidential complaint to US securities regulators, that in July 2024 Google's cloud division answered a support request from an Israeli military email address seeking to make Gemini more reliable at identifying drones, armoured vehicles and soldiers in aerial video, and that staff ran internal tests to help. The complaint alleges Google misled investors by acting against its published AI principles. Google says it answered 'a general use question' as it would for any customer, with standard help-desk information, and that the account was spending under a couple of hundred dollars a month.

Google supplies machine learning and artificial intelligence tools including facial recognition, automatic image classification, object tracking and sentiment analysis, and since October 2023 has provided Israeli military units with AI technology and services 'used for operational capabilities on an unprecedented scale', records the Israeli research centre Who Profits, which lists the company under population control, specialised equipment and services, and the wall and checkpoints. It dates Nimbus 2021 to 2028, puts the initial investment in local Israeli cloud sites at an estimated NIS 4 billion, and records Google Play hosting the al-Munasseq permit application.

Norway's finance minister paused the exclusion work of the Council on Ethics of the $2.1 trillion Government Pension Fund Global. The council had been due to assess Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft over their Israeli work under guidelines that could have forced divestment. US technology stocks are more than 15% of the fund's equity value and its Alphabet holding alone exceeds $20 billion.

Google and Amazon may not restrict how Israeli military and security services use Project Nimbus, may not suspend Israel's access even for breaches of the suppliers' own terms, and may not act in a way that would 'discriminate' against the Israeli government, under a finalised contract among Israeli finance ministry documents leaked to the Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call. It also records 'special compensation': coded shekel payments matching a country's dialling code, signalling to Israel that a foreign court had compelled disclosure of its data. Google says the idea it would evade its legal obligations is 'categorically wrong'.

Microsoft withdrew Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200's access to a set of cloud and AI services, after its own review found preliminary support for reporting by the Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call that the unit had stored intercepted Palestinian phone calls on Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform.

A federal judge in California denied Google's motion to dismiss the retaliation claims of nine former employees dismissed after the April 2024 protests, holding that further factual development was required; some state-law claims were dismissed. The workers allege they were punished for opposing both Project Nimbus and the treatment of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim colleagues. A separate claim by a former employee of fifteen years proceeded in part on 31 July 2026. More than fifty of those dismissed had also filed an unfair labour practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board in 2024, seeking reinstatement and back pay.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded on reasonable grounds that Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have committed and are continuing to commit acts of genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, that they have and continue to have genocidal intent, and that the State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide. The analysis covers Gaza from 7 October 2023 to 31 July 2025.

Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, described the United Nations as 'transparently antisemitic' after the Special Rapporteur's June 2025 report naming Alphabet over Project Nimbus, in screenshots from an internal Google forum whose authenticity the Washington Post verified with a current member of the forum.

Alphabet and Amazon hold a $1.2 billion Israeli contract, Project Nimbus, awarded in 2021 and 'largely funded through Ministry of Defense expenditure', and Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon 'grant Israel virtually government-wide access' to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, found the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory. Israel-located servers give data sovereignty and 'a shield from accountability', under contracts she describes as offering minimal restrictions or oversight. The Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical infrastructure in October 2023 when the Israeli military's internal cloud overloaded.

In an internal assessment obtained by The Intercept, Google concluded before the contract was signed that its cloud services could be used for or linked to 'the facilitation of human rights violations', including Israeli activity in the West Bank, and that this carried a risk of reputational harm. The documents show the company understood it would not be able to monitor or prevent what Israel did with the technology.

Project Nimbus serves all branches of the Israeli government, and Israeli military units played a leading role in designing the contract, in the American Friends Service Committee's company file. It also records a March 2024 consulting agreement to expand cloud access for further military units, the 'Adjusted Terms of Service' granting Israel discretion over use, the reported use of Google Photos face grouping for identification in Gaza, and the dismissal of more than fifty employees in April 2024.

Google rewrote its AI principles around three tenets (bold innovation, collaborative progress, and responsible development and deployment) and removed the previous section listing applications it would not pursue, which had included weapons, surveillance contravening internationally accepted norms, and uses contrary to international law and human rights. Published alongside the company's responsible AI progress report.

Google escalated an October 2023 request from Israel's Ministry of Defense for expanded access to its Vertex AI tools and granted the access by mid-November 2023, in internal documents obtained by the Washington Post; one records an employee thanking a colleague for facilitating the request. Documents from 2024 show continued military requests for wider AI access, including for Gemini in November 2024, and internal concern about losing the business to Amazon. Google has publicly said its Nimbus work is not directed at classified or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.

Only 'adjusted terms of service' apply to the cloud services Israel consumes on the suppliers' infrastructure, and the government 'may make any use of any service' in the supplier's catalogue, free of restrictions including permitted-use rules, states an Israeli government document obtained by The Intercept. The Israeli finance ministry declined to publish those terms, calling them confidential. Google's president Kent Walker had said publicly that everything on Google's public cloud is subject to its acceptable use policy; a Google spokesperson said 'nothing has changed' but did not address the adjusted terms.

Google workers held vigils in New York, Seattle and London for Mai Ubeid, a Palestinian software engineer who graduated from the Google-funded Gaza Sky Geeks coding school and was killed with her family in an Israeli air strike on 31 October 2023; managers warned some staff for handing out leaflets about her on company property. The YouTube software engineer Zelda Montes was dismissed after the April 2024 sit-in, and Ariel Koren left the company after raising Nimbus concerns.

7amleh, the Palestinian digital rights organisation (The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media), asks technology companies to commission independent human rights impact assessments, publish them, implement every recommendation to a transparent timetable, and engage with Palestinian civil society outside periods of escalation. Its report, produced with a contribution from the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, devotes a section to Project Nimbus and records Israel's national cyber chief Gaby Portnoy telling a Nimbus conference that 'phenomenal things are happening in battle' because of the Nimbus public cloud, things impactful for victory.

The International Court of Justice found Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful, held settlements and their associated economic activity contrary to international law, and set out the obligations of states in relation to dealings arising from the occupation.

Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the two state-owned weapons manufacturers, are required to buy their cloud computing from Google or Amazon under the Nimbus framework, in Israeli finance ministry procurement documents obtained by The Intercept. The same documents record the Israel Land Authority among Nimbus customers.

Google dismissed 28 employees the day after sit-ins at its offices in New York and Sunnyvale on 16 April 2024, including a ten-hour occupation of Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian's office, and the total reached around fifty after further investigation. Nine workers were arrested. Google described the protests as 'completely unacceptable behavior'. The workers organised as No Tech for Apartheid, a campaign formed in 2021.

The Israeli military ran a mass facial recognition programme in Gaza using the face-grouping feature in Google Photos, a free consumer product, alongside a system from the Israeli firm Corsight, the New York Times reported in March 2024, quoting an Israeli officer who said the Google feature worked better than the alternatives. The Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was detained and beaten after being picked out this way, and released without charge; soldiers told him it had been a mistake. Google declined to comment on the use of its product.

Google opened its Israeli cloud region, me-west1 in Tel Aviv, saying the local region supports data residency and compliance requirements and that the Israeli government had selected Google Cloud to serve its ministries. Servers inside Israel are what keep the state's data there rather than abroad.

Google Cloud won Project Nimbus through a public tender run by Israel's Government Procurement Administration, on an initial seven-year engagement extendable to twenty-three years, covering government ministries, authorities and government-owned companies, with higher education institutions, health maintenance organisations and municipalities also able to buy from it. Israel's Accountant General, Yali Rothenberg, is quoted congratulating Google in the company's own announcement.

The Palestinian Digital Rights Coalition, convened by 7amleh with the Council of Human Rights Organizations, warned that the Israeli Civil Administration's al-Munasseq application, which Palestinians in the occupied West Bank use to apply for movement and work permits, collects files, messages, location data and camera access, and asked third states and civil society to ensure Palestinians are not compelled to use rights-violating digital services. Google Play hosts the application, records the Israeli research centre Who Profits.