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project nimbus
'Drop Project Nimbus!': Protester of Amazon Genocide Complicity Put in Chokehold at 'AI for Good' Summit
"Is this the future you want to see? Where AI executives pretend like they have the answers, that they are doing good, and you're giving them a stage?"
Jul 08, 2026
A protester was violently removed from the United Nations AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva on Wednesday after Palestine defenders disrupted a presentation by a senior Amazon executive to denounce Big Tech's complicity in Israel's genocidal war on Gaza.
Pro-Palestine activists linked to the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement are protesting the UN International Telecommunications Union (ITU) conference over its partnerships with tech titans, especially Amazon and Google. In 2021, the pair signed a $1.2 billion contract for Project Nimbus, which provides cloud services to the Israeli government and military.
Under the deal, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud provide the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli government agencies with cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence tools, and data storage. The contract prohibits Google or Amazon from refusing service to Israeli government, military, or intelligence agencies.
Project Nimbus sparked the #NoTechForApartheid campaign, in which disaffected tech workers and dozens of advocacy groups rose up against Big Tech’s complicity in Israeli human rights crimes in Palestine, including the Gaza genocide; apartheid; and illegal occupation, settler colonization, and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
On Wednesday, activists interrupted a summit speech by Amazon vice president and chief technology officer (CTO) Werner Vogels, with protesters taking the stage—two of them holding a large sign reading "No Tech for Apartheid"—as others in the audience chanted "Drop Project Nimbus!"
"You are making Project Nimbus, a project of billions of dollars that Amazon is investing so that Israel has free access to your servers," the man who upstaged Vogels said as the Amazon CTO stood by with his hands on his hips. "You are investing billions in that. Your technology, Project Nimbus, develops Lavender, develops the software Where's Daddy, that actively tracks, using AI, people in Palestine, and when they come back, they kill them together with their families."
"And you know this... and you're making millions out of this," the protester continued. "You're sitting here as if you're trying to do good, as if you're trying to be for the good of AI. What do you have to say for yourself? How do you sleep at night?"
"Maybe that's why you're looking so panicked. Maybe that's why you cannot even stand on this stage anymore and look at these people, because you know exactly what your technology is being used for," the activist said after Vogels stepped off the stage.
"They know exactly where their profits are coming from, and they continue anyway," the protester added, drawing loud cheers.
As the activists holding the sign were removed from the stage, the man speaking gestured to Vogels and others and said: "You should be stopping them! You should be stopping those criminals right here! Why are you facilitating genocide? Why are you continuing to be complicit in the deaths of innocent people three years on?"
Security personnel then removed the man from the stage as he said: "No violence. No violence."
"Why are you putting me in a chokehold?" he asked as he was violently ejected. "Is this the future you want to see?... Where AI executives pretend like they have the answers, like they are doing good, and you're giving them a stage? Shame on you, Amazon! Drop Project Nimbus!"
Activists with the BDS movement and other groups also protested at last year's AI for Good summit, which came on the heels of a report by UN independent Palestine expert Francesca Albanese detailing corporate complicity and direct participation in Israeli crimes against Palestinians and specifically naming dozens of companies, including Amazon and Google parent company Alphabet.
More than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded, including thousands of people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of the flattened Gaza Strip, since Israel launched its US-backed war on October 7, 2023, when Hamas led the deadliest attack on Israel in the country's 78-year history. Around 2 million Palestinians have been forcibly displaced, while Israel's "complete siege" of Gaza fueled famine and disease.
Israel is facing a genocide case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The International Criminal Court, also located in the Dutch city, has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.
The Geneva summit follows the creation earlier this month of the ITU's AI for Good Global Commission, which is co-chaired by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Rwandan President Paul Kagame, whose repressive 32-year rule has been criticized for persistent human rights abuses. Both Amazon and Google are represented on the commission.
The summit also comes amid growing worldwide opposition to the unchecked development of AI technology, which experts warn will lead to job losses on an unprecedented scale, widening economic inequality, environmental and climate harms, social isolation, increased government surveillance, "killer robots," and, in the long term, possibly even human extinction.
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Denials Can’t Cloud the Truth That Google Is Complicit in the Gaza Genocide
Google and Sergey Brin know their company’s technology is not neutral—it is a pillar of Israel’s machinery of destruction.
Jul 16, 2025
Sergey Brin, the billionaire cofounder of Google, recently accused the United Nations of being “transparently antisemitic” because, in its exhaustively researched report, it rightly pointed out Google's complicity in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the escalating settler violence in the West Bank.
Brin's denial of the genocide in Gaza is not only morally blind but extremely dangerous. It distracts from the real tragedy unfolding in Gaza and, by resorting to tiresome tropes, attempts to silence legitimate criticism with accusations of antisemitism.
Brin insists that calling this genocide offends Jews who have survived history’s worst crimes. But what exactly does he call it? What name does he give to the burial of entire families beneath their homes, to the deliberate starvation and dispossession of millions? A people’s past suffering does not grant them exclusive rights to define atrocity, or to deny it when others endure it. Israel, through decades of occupation and violence, has forfeited any claim to moral authority. In fact, numerous Jewish organizations and voices around the world have strongly opposed Israel’s actions in Gaza precisely because they recognize the moral imperative to speak out against atrocities, regardless of who commits them.
According to the U.N. Genocide Convention, genocide is “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” What has unfolded in Gaza meets that definition with chilling precision. Over 55,000 Palestinians are already counted among the dead—but who is left to count the bodies buried under pulverized neighborhoods, or to record the names of entire families erased in a single airstrike? This is the largest population of pediatric amputees and orphaned children in living memory.
If Google were serious about accountability, it would immediately terminate Project Nimbus and all other contracts that fuel military violence and human rights abuses.
Yet from his billionaire’s perch, Mr. Brin shrugs this catastrophe away, drawing facile parallels to his own family’s past suffering. Why is it so often those who should understand the price of dehumanization who are quickest to deny it when others are targeted? What does Brin need to see before he calls it genocide? More corpses? More pulverized infrastructure? Must every child be starved or buried under rubble before the truth becomes undeniable?
The U.N. report unequivocally lays out Google’s complicity. Through its involvement in Project Nimbus—a $1.2 billion contract awarded by Israel to Google and Amazon—the company has played an active and central role in supporting the genocide in Gaza. The project empowered the Israeli military with advanced cloud computing and artificial intelligence capabilities—tools essential for processing vast amounts of data, coordinating attacks, and executing precision strikes on densely populated civilian areas. Google is providing Israel with the instruments of genocide.
Internal documents obtained by The Washington Post confirm that Google staff directly assisted Israel’s Ministry of Defense and military after the October attacks, deliberately discarding ethical commitments that had previously restricted the company from weaponizing its AI technologies. Even more troubling, Google suppressed internal dissent by terminating employees who raised principled objections. A company that silences its workforce while publicly claiming innocence is not only duplicitous and greedy, it is also an integral part of the genocidal machinery, which Israel has refined with chilling expertise.
Brin and Google aren’t alone in this grim enterprise. The U.N. report names other corporate giants profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza. Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems, and Israel Aerospace Industries have filled their ledgers by providing bombs, drones, and fighter jets that obliterate homes and hospitals. Amazon, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard have supplied surveillance tools and cloud infrastructure to track, monitor, and repress Palestinians. Even banks and insurers have invested in settlement expansion, cementing apartheid as a lucrative business model. Together, these companies have woven an economy where genocide becomes just another line item on quarterly reports, with U.S. taxpayers footing much of the bill.
Google and Sergey Brin know their company’s technology is not neutral—it is a pillar of Israel’s machinery of destruction. Denial or deflection is morally indefensible and only paves the way for more killing. If Google were serious about accountability, it would immediately terminate Project Nimbus and all other contracts that fuel military violence and human rights abuses. But we all know that will never happen. The profits are simply too good, and the cost—thousands of Palestinian lives—too little.
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Dems Press Palantir on Trump-Era Contracts for 'Mega-Database' of Americans' Info
"We are concerned that Palantir's software could be used to enable domestic operations that violate Americans' rights."
Jun 17, 2025
A group of Democratic lawmakers on Monday pressed the CEO of Palantir Technologies about the company's hundreds of millions of dollars in recent federal contracts and reporting that the big data analytics specialist is helping the government build a "mega-database" of Americans' private information in likely violation of multiple laws.
Citing New York Times reporting from late last month examining the Colorado-based tech giant's hundreds of millions of dollars in new government contracts during the second term of U.S. President Donald Trump, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) led a letter to Palantir CEO Alex Karp demanding answers regarding reports that the company "is amassing troves of data on Americans to create a government-wide, searchable 'mega-database' containing the sensitive taxpayer data of American citizens."
NEW: It looks like Palantir is helping Trump build a mega-database of Americans' private information so he can target and spy on his enemies, or anyone. @aoc.bsky.social and I are demanding answers directly from Palantir.
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— Senator Ron Wyden (@wyden.senate.gov) June 17, 2025 at 7:10 AM
The letter continues:
According to press reports, Palantir employees have reportedly been installed at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), where they are helping the agency use Palantir's software to create a "single, searchable database" of taxpayer records. The sensitive taxpayer data compiled into this Palantir database will likely be shared throughout the government regardless of whether access to this information will be related to tax administration or enforcement, which is generally a violation of federal law. Palantir's products and services were reportedly selected for this brazenly illegal project by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Several DOGE members are former Palantir employees.
The lawmakers called the prospect of Americans' data being shared across federal agencies "a surveillance nightmare that raises a host of legal concerns, not least that it will make it significantly easier for Donald Trump's administration to spy on and target his growing list of enemies and other Americans."
"We are concerned that Palantir's software could be used to enable domestic operations that violate Americans' rights," the letter states. "Donald Trump has personally threatened to arrest the governor of California, federalized National Guard troops without the consent of the governor for immigration raids, deployed active-duty Marines to Los Angeles against the wishes of local and state officials, condoned violence against peaceful protestors, called the independent press 'the enemy of the people,' and abused the power of the federal government in unprecedented ways to punish people and institutions he dislikes."
"Palantir's troubling assistance to the Trump administration is not limited to its work for the IRS," the letter notes, highlighting the company's role in Immigration and Customs Enforcement's mass deportation efforts and deadly U.S. and allied military operations.
The letter does not mention Palantir's involvement in Project Nimbus, a cloud computing collaboration between Israel's military and tech titans Amazon and Google targeted by the No Tech for Apartheid movement over alleged human rights violations. But the lawmakers did note that companies including IBM, Cisco, Honeywell, and others have been complicit in human rights crimes in countries including Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, China, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
The lawmakers asked Karp to provide a list of all contracts awarded to Palantir, their dollar amount, the federal agencies involved, whether the company has any "red line" regarding human rights violations, and other information.
In addition to Wyden and Ocasio-Cortez, the letter is signed by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Reps. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.).
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