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Short abstract:

We investigate the $1.2 billion cloud migration tender won by Google and Amazon for Israel, analyzing scalability on national and global axes, challenging the traditional hierarchical concept of scale. We highlight the tension between national scaling and participating in global tech cloud regions.

Long abstract:

Our paper examines the $1.2 billion tender won by Google (GCP) and Amazon (AWS) to facilitate “moving the state of Israel into the cloud” through two axes of scale. First - the national - measures the scalability of such undertakings through a recontextualisation of the state’s capacity to store, process and manipulate local data in tech giants’ clouds. Second - the global - challenges the scalability of GCP’s and AWS’s growing glocal “cloud regions” as both highly standardized and painstakingly dependent on existing historical assemblages. In doing so we reject the traditional hierarchical conceptualisation of scale in favour of a flat ontology (Marston, Jones, and Woodward 2005). By becoming “[a] node in others’ networks, both built in and left out” (Johnson 2019, 75) Nimbus defies easy categorisation in terms of power relations, environmental impact, or data extractivism. Growing its national component might reduce its effectiveness as a participant in a tech cloud region and vice versa. In such unpacking, we aim to resist the framing of scale as a teleological “scaling” used both in big tech but - perhaps more alarmingly - byits critics who nonetheless adopt such presuppositions (Hanna and Park 2020). Instead, we propose to think of scale as multidimensional and often-times necessary, as for when good public governance is required to leverage limited resources during a time of crisis.