Last weekend, Google CEO Sundar Pichai faced a small revolt when he gave his commencement speech at Stanford University, where he earned a graduate degree in materials science and engineering. About 200 of the graduates walked out, while others reportedly booed the tech executives loudly.
The focus of the protests has been Google’s defense relationships, including Project Nimbus, a controversial $1.2 billion contract it shared with Amazon to provide cloud and AI services to the Israeli military, and its relationship with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Student signs included phrases such as “ICE SPIES WITH GOOGLE AI” and “GENOCIDE RUNS ON GOOGLE,” as well as a press release related to the protest note: “FREE FREE PALESTINE.” Students also waved Palestinian flags and chanted ‘Free Palestine’, an online video captured the protest.
A statement regarding the protest reads, “We are leaving because we glorify the companies that encourage this violence and refuse to exercise our power to make different choices.”
The strike was organized by several campus activist groups, including Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine, No Tech for Apartheid, and Tech for Liberation. TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment.
As the war in Gaza intensifies, Google’s participation in Nimbus has sparked protests both inside and outside the company. Google fired 28 employees for protesting the 2024 contract, but internal opposition over the issue continued even after that. It also recently came under fire from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, saying the foundation and other companies are “choosing to look the other way” on Israel’s use of its services.
Project Nimbus is also supported by Amazon. Microsoft has also been criticized for supporting the Israeli military. Microsoft restricted the Israeli government’s use of its technology after an investigation found that its cloud services were being used for mass surveillance of Palestinians.
This student protest was also criticized online by business leaders. Vinod Khosla, the billionaire co-founder of Sun Microsystems and one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists, posted on It was also selfish, he added, because the students were “ignoring the bottom three billion people on the planet who could benefit from AI and worrying about their misguided, selfish self-interest.”
Pichai’s appearance at Stanford is part of a broader pattern. Speakers attending college graduation ceremonies across the country were booed for trying to get outgoing college students interested in AI. But rarely has student hostility been as targeted as Pichai’s, aimed not at the AI hype but at specific business decisions made by the company he leads. In general, young people seem to believe that AI could threaten their employment opportunities and ruin other parts of society as well.
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