Stanford Graduates Walk Out as Google CEO Speaks, Chanting for Palestine

More than 100 Stanford students and graduates walked out on Sunday as Google CEO Sundar Pichai began delivering the university’s commencement address, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Free, free Palestine.” The protest was organized by anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and No Tech for Apartheid, and was tied to a long-running campaign against Google’s role in Project Nimbus and its ties to the Israeli government.

Pichai, a Stanford alumnus who earned a master’s degree in materials engineering there in 1995, had been chosen earlier this year as the guest speaker for Stanford’s 135th commencement ceremony, held on June 14. He continued speaking despite the disruption. His remarks focused mainly on optimism and adapting to change, not on artificial intelligence or geopolitics.

The protest reflected broader anger over Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract that Google and Amazon hold to provide cloud and AI services to the Israeli government. Critics, including company employees and pro-Palestinian activists, say the technology could be used by the IDF and security services in ways that harm Palestinians. Google has previously rejected those claims, saying the deal is for government cloud services.

The dispute has also caused internal unrest at Google. In 2024, the company fired dozens of employees who occupied the Google Cloud CEO’s office in California to protest its business with the Israeli government under Project Nimbus. Pichai did not answer a BBC question about the demonstration. He also appeared to avoid AI, likely after recent commencement boos for former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona and for Big Machine Records CEO Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State University after both praised AI.

Instead, Pichai told graduates that he had been advised on what not to say, and joked that people expected the day to be difficult for him, adding, “those are the last two letters of my last name.” He then returned to his central message of optimism, recounting how he arrived in California in the 1990s expecting to see green landscapes, only to be corrected by a local host who said the dry brown hills were actually “golden.” “That is exactly what I mean when I say choose optimism,” he said. “Where I saw brown, she saw gold.”