Israel's government has signed a $1.2 billion deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google.

The deal will see the BigTech giants provide cloud services for the country's public sector and military.

The multi-part project is known as “Project Nimbus”.

AWS and Google beat out Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM for the tender, who are currently appealing the decision.

Israel’s Finance Ministry officials said the cloud migration would begin in two months, though some data would continue to be kept on-premises.

Big four accountancy firm KPMG also won a tender to advise on Israel’s cloud migration strategy.

Google and Amazon also committed to making investments in Israel equivalent to 20 per cent of the value of the contract.

Public sector cloud procurement can be a highly controversial issue; the United States Department of Defence’s cloud computing contract, which is worth around $10 billion, was awarded to Microsoft after over a year of cross-party legal and political disputes.

In August 2020, it was reported that Amazon was planning to build three data centres in Israel in a project worth $293 million.

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