Google provides cloud computing services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and the tech giant has negotiated deepening its partnership during Israel’s war in Gaza, a company document viewed by TIME shows.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense, according to the document, has its own “landing zone” into Google Cloud—a secure entry point to Google-provided computing infrastructure, which would allow the ministry to store and process data, and access AI services.

Project Nimbus is a controversial $1.2 billion cloud computing and AI agreement between the Israeli government and two tech companies: Google and Amazon. Reports in the Israeli press have previously indicated that Google and Amazon are contractually barred from preventing specific arms of the Israeli state using their technology under Project Nimbus. But this is the first time the existence of a contract showing that the Israeli Ministry of Defense is a Google Cloud customer has been made public.

Google recently described its work for the Israeli government as largely for civilian purposes. “We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education,” a Google spokesperson told TIME for a story published on April 8. “Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    I’m sending this article to my girlfriend to convince her to ditch her Gmail account.

    Not sure it’s gonna work 😅

    On Lemmy, I’m almost sure only a few use Gmail because everyone is kind of tech savvy.

    Ditching YouTube is more complicated, but ditching Gmail is easy.

    • S_204@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      The hilarity of thinking people here are tech savvy because they have an app is pretty cute to me. This place is slightly less accessible than Reddit but it’s hardly difficult to navigate around.