Google (Alphabet Inc.)

Revenue of $119.8 billion, up 24% year on year, with Google Cloud revenue up 82% to $24.8 billion and a cloud backlog of $514 billion. Full-year capital expenditure guidance was raised to $195–205 billion. The campaign has cost Google workers, litigation and campus standing; it has not cost it growth, which is why divestment arguments should be framed as exclusion on principle.

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. Recruitment and campus standing are where a technology company feels this kind of pressure first.

EFF sets out the gap between Google's public position (that Nimbus is 'not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads' and is governed by its acceptable use policies) and reporting that the Israeli government may use any service in the supplier's catalogue. It asks both companies 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. EFF records that Amazon ignored its 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 BDS National Committee, the coalition that coordinates the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, renewed its call for pressure on Google and Amazon over Project Nimbus, asking institutions to end contracts with them. The committee categorises Google as a pressure and divestment target rather than a consumer boycott target, which is why the asks on this page run through buyers, investors and staff.

A former Google employee filed a confidential complaint with US securities regulators alleging that in July 2024 Google's cloud division answered a support request from someone using 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. A Google spokesperson said: 'We answered a general use question, as we would for any customer, with standard, help desk information', and that the account's spending was under a couple of hundred dollars a month.

The Israeli research centre lists Google under population control, specialised equipment and services, and the wall and checkpoints. It records Nimbus as running 2021 to 2028, with local cloud sites in Israel at an initial investment estimated at NIS 4 billion; the supply of machine learning and artificial intelligence tools including facial recognition, automatic image classification, object tracking and sentiment analysis; that since October 2023 Google Cloud has provided Israeli military units with AI technology and services 'used for operational capabilities on an unprecedented scale'; and that Google Play hosts the al-Munasseq permit application. The page states the information is valid until 01/02/2026.

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.

A joint investigation based on leaked Israeli finance ministry documents including a finalised version of the Nimbus contract. It reports that the contract prevents the companies from restricting how Israeli military and security services use the services, and from suspending Israel's access even for breaches of the suppliers' own terms; that Israel is 'entitled to migrate to the cloud or generate in the cloud any content data they wish'; and that the companies may not act in a way that would 'discriminate' against the Israeli government. It also reports the 'winking mechanism', recorded in the contract as 'special compensation': coded shekel payments matching a country's dialling code, to signal to Israel that a foreign court had compelled disclosure of its data. Google's response: 'The idea that we would evade our legal obligations to the US government as a US company, or in any other country, is categorically wrong.'

After a joint investigation by the Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call found that Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200 had stored intercepted Palestinian phone calls on Azure, Microsoft's own review found preliminary support for the reporting and the company withdrew the unit's access to a set of cloud and AI services. The clearest documented case of a cloud supplier enforcing its terms against an Israeli military customer, and the comparison to put to Google.

A federal judge in the Northern District of California denied Google's motion to dismiss the retaliation claims brought by 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 was allowed to proceed 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.

Screenshots from an internal Google forum, whose authenticity the Washington Post verified with a current member of the forum, show co-founder Sergey Brin describing the United Nations in those terms following the Special Rapporteur's June 2025 report naming Alphabet over Project Nimbus. The company's most senior figures have engaged with the finding by disputing the body that made it.

Names Alphabet Inc. (Google). The report records that in 2021 Israel awarded Alphabet and Amazon.com a $1.2 billion contract, Project Nimbus, 'largely funded through Ministry of Defense expenditure', to provide core tech infrastructure. It finds that Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon 'grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies', that the Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and AI infrastructure in October 2023 when the Israeli internal military cloud overloaded, and that Israel-located servers 'ensure data sovereignty and a shield from accountability, under favourable contracts offering minimal restrictions or oversight'. It records that in July 2024 an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in every sense of the word, citing these companies.

An internal Google assessment, prepared before the contract was signed, warned that 'Google 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.

The American Friends Service Committee's company file records Project Nimbus as serving all branches of the Israeli government, with military units having played a leading role in designing the contract; the October 2023 escalation of the Ministry of Defense request for Vertex AI access; the March 2024 consulting agreement to expand cloud access for further military units; the reported use of Google Photos' face grouping for identification in Gaza; the 'Adjusted Terms of Service' granting Israel discretion over use; 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. The revision was published alongside the company's responsible AI progress report.

Internal documents show Google escalating an October 2023 request from Israel's Ministry of Defense for expanded access to its Vertex AI tools, and granting the access by mid-November 2023. A November 2023 document records a Google employee thanking a colleague for facilitating the request. Further 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.

An Israeli government document states that 'the Adjusted Terms of Service are the only terms that shall apply to the cloud services consumed' on the suppliers' infrastructure, and that the government 'may make any use of any service included in the supplier's catalog', with no restrictions including 'permitted use' rules. The Israeli finance ministry declined to publish the adjusted 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 told The Intercept 'nothing has changed' but did not address the adjusted terms.

Records the vigils Google workers held 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; some staff were warned by managers for handing out leaflets about her on company property. Names workers who acted, including the YouTube software engineer Zelda Montes, dismissed after the April 2024 sit-in, and Ariel Koren, who left the company after raising Nimbus concerns.

A report by the Palestinian digital rights organisation 7amleh, The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, produced with a contribution from the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. It devotes a section to Project Nimbus, records the Israeli National Cyber Directorate chief Gaby Portnoy telling a Nimbus conference that 'phenomenal things are happening in battle because of the Nimbus public cloud, things that are impactful for victory', and notes that Google's logo was removed at the last minute from the sponsor list of the July 2024 'IT for IDF' conference. Its demands of technology companies are specific: 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.

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. The legal framework on which public procurement reviews and institutional exclusion decisions rest.

Israeli finance ministry procurement documents show that 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. The same documents record the Israel Land Authority among Nimbus customers.

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

The New York Times reported in March 2024 that the Israeli military ran a mass facial recognition programme in Gaza using a system from the Israeli firm Corsight alongside the face-grouping feature in Google Photos, a free consumer product, and that an Israeli officer 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's announcement of its Tel Aviv cloud region, me-west1. The post states that Google Cloud was selected by the Israeli government to provide cloud services to government ministries, and that the local region supports data residency and compliance requirements. Israeli servers are what make the state's data resident in Israel rather than abroad.

Google's own announcement of Project Nimbus. It records that Google Cloud was chosen through a public tender run by Israel's Government Procurement Administration, that the engagement runs for an initial seven years and may be extended to twenty-three, and that it covers government ministries, authorities and government-owned companies, with higher education institutions, health maintenance organisations and municipalities also able to buy from it. The Accountant General of Israel, Yali Rothenberg, is quoted congratulating Google on the win.

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. The Israeli research centre Who Profits records that Google Play hosts the application.