New Delhi: More than 100 Stanford University graduates staged a walkout during Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s commencement address on 14 June. The students protested the company’s involvement in Project Nimbus, a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.
Protesters chanted “Free Palestine” as they exited the university’s 135th commencement ceremony. Some audience members even booed the business executive. The walkout was organised by the Students for Justice in Palestine and No Tech for Apartheid.
“We don’t need another tech billionaire to tell us how to get rich off of the killing and surveillance of Palestinians,” Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) stated as per Drop Site.
The walkout
Pichai, a Stanford alumnus who earned a master’s degree in materials science and engineering from the university in 1995, was selected earlier this year as the keynote speaker for the graduation ceremony.
During his speech, the CEO briefly joked about the growing expectations for him to discuss artificial intelligence. Referring to his surname, he remarked that the topic was difficult to avoid because “it is the last two letters of my last name, after all.”
The walkout also drew reactions online. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a Stanford MBA graduate, criticised the protest on X.
“The stupidity of these @Stanford students to take the greatest opportunity for equality in humanity ever and to really free humanity and go walk out on @google and @sundarpichai that’s pioneered that,” Khosla wrote.
The protest occurred amid continuing campus debates over Israel’s war in Gaza and increasing scepticism of the relationship between major US-tech companies and Israel.
The University of California, Berkeley, recently found itself at the centre of a similar controversy after a graduate student was temporarily denied his diploma for carrying a Palestinian flag during a commencement ceremony on 22 May.
“The repression that followed my act is a small example of the UC system’s wider complicity toward the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” said the student.
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What is Project Nimbus?
The walkout focused on Google’s role in Project Nimbus, which is a reported $1.2 billion cloud computing and artificial intelligence contract jointly held by Google and Amazon to provide cloud services to Israeli government agencies.
Critics of the project, including activists and some Google employees, argue that the technology could support the Israeli military during the ongoing conflict in Gaza. The search engine, however, has consistently maintained that the agreement provides standard government cloud services and defended its participation in the project.
The dispute has generated significant controversy within the company. In 2024, Google dismissed dozens of employees following sit-ins and demonstrations at offices in California and New York.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)