Shoshanna Solomon is The Times of Israel's Startups and Business reporter
This undated photo made available by Google shows colorful pipes sending and receiving water for cooling Google's data center in The Dalles, Oregon (photo credit: AP/Google, Connie Zhou)
Tech giants Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud services arm of Amazon, have been chosen as the winners of a NIS 4 billion tender ($1.2 billion) to provide cloud-based regional data services to Israel, the Finance Ministry said in a statement.
The two tech giants won against Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. All of the multinationals had offered their services to build data centers and provide cloud services to local public entities, with all of the data secured within the borders of Israel under strict security guidelines.