In May 2021, Google announced it had agreed to participate in a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government and military, saying it was “delighted to have been chosen to help digitally transform” the country. But four months earlier, officials at the company had worried that signing the deal, called Project Nimbus, would harm its reputation, according to documents prepared for executives that were reviewed by The New York Times. Google’s lawyers, policy team employees and outside consultants — who were asked to assess the risks of the agreement — wrote that since “sensitive customers” like Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Israeli Security Agency were included in the contract, “Google Cloud services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations, including Israeli activity in the West Bank.”The files, which have not been previously reported on, showed that despite Google’s public defense of Nimbus over the last three years, the company once had concerns about the contract similar to those of some employees, who have argued that it pulled Google into a long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

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Persons: “, —, Nimbus Organizations: Google, The New York Times, Israel’s Ministry of Defense, Israeli Security Agency, West Bank