In a meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle in late 2021, the then-head of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel, won the support of the tech giant’s CEO, Satya Nadella, to develop a customized and segregated area within Azure that has facilitated the army’s mass surveillance project. According to the sources, Sariel approached Microsoft because the scope of Israel’s intelligence on millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is so vast that it cannot be stored on military servers alone.

According to the Guardian’s reporting, the leaked documents suggest that 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data — equivalent to roughly 200 million hours of audio — were being stored on Microsoft’s servers in the Netherlands by July of this year, while smaller portions were being stored in Ireland and Israel. It is not possible to tell how much of this data belongs specifically to Unit 8200; as a previous investigation by +972, Local Call, and the Guardian revealed earlier this year, dozens of Israeli army units have purchased cloud computing services from Microsoft, and the company has a footprint in all major military infrastructures in Israel.

In internal documents from 2023, Microsoft estimated that the partnership with Unit 8200 would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the company over five years. It noted that the unit’s leadership hoped to multiply the amount of data it stores in Microsoft’s servers “tenfold” over the next few years.