Google Supports Israel's Military To Beat Amazon

Google partnered with the Israeli military (photo: dock. Google)

JAKARTA A secret document discussing the partnership between Google and Israel was revealed recently. In the document, it is recorded that Google directly supports the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

The internal files shared by the Washington Post contradict Google's statement last year. The tech giant had denied allegations that they were helping the Israeli military. To employees and the public, they admitted that they only helped the civilian government.

However, this document actually supports public allegations. Google reportedly partnered with the IDF after the ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. At that time, an employee in Google's cloud division stepped up the Israeli military's request to access Google's Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology.

Still in the same document, the employee stated that Google should respond to Israeli military requests. If Google is slow in responding to its request, Israel will switch to a cloud service developed by Amazon.

A month after the invasion, in November 2023 to be exact, an employee expressed his gratitude for pressing his work to meet IDF requests. After that, the partnership continued as employees asked for additional access to Google AI tools

This partnership is believed to be related to Project Nimbus worth USD 1.2 billion (IDR 19.5 trillion). This joint Amazon computing service project was protested by Google employees until the company took action by firing them.

Despite getting a lot of criticism while running this project, Google has repeatedly stated that they are not helping the IDF. They also said that they only helped the Israeli government in carrying out heavy workloads.

"This work is not aimed at a very sensitive, confidential, or military workload relevant to weapons or intelligence agencies," said Anna Kowalczyk, Google Cloud's External Communications Manager, quoted by The Verge.