Pichai booed at Stanford over Google defense, ICE ties
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- Sundar Pichai delivered Stanford's commencement speech over the weekend and was booed by members of the graduating class, with about 200 students walking out in protest — an unusually targeted reception for a graduation speaker.
- The protest centered on Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion Google and Amazon contract to provide cloud and AI services to the Israeli military, as well as Google's relationship with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
- Student signs read "ICE SPIES WITH GOOGLE AI" and "GENOCIDE RUNS ON GOOGLE," while protesters waved Palestinian flags and chanted "free Palestine," according to video of the demonstration.
- The walkout was organized by Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine, No Tech for Apartheid, and Tech for Liberation, who said in a statement they "refuse to glorify the corporations that fuel this violence."
- In 2024, Google fired 28 workers for protesting the Nimbus contract, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently accused the company and others of "choosing to look the other way" on Israel's use of their services.
- Vinod Khosla, the Sun Microsystems co-founder and prominent venture capitalist, posted on X that the protest was "biased, idiotic, short-sighted and very selfish," arguing students ignored "the bottom 3 billion people on this planet that could benefit from AI."
Why it matters: Unlike recent graduation-speaker boos aimed at AI hype generally, the anger at Pichai was directed at specific Google business decisions — a $1.2 billion defense contract and ICE work that already cost 28 Google employees their jobs in 2024. The episode shows that student and employee dissent is now targeting the contracts tech companies take, not just the technology they build.
