Stanford Graduates Walk Out on Google CEO, Chanting for Palestine

More than 100 Stanford University graduates walked out on Sunday during the school’s 135th commencement ceremony as Google CEO Sundar Pichai began his keynote address. The protesters waved Palestinian flags and chanted, “Free, free Palestine,” in an action organized by anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and No Tech for Apartheid.

Pichai, a Stanford alumnus who earned a master’s degree in materials engineering there in 1995, had been chosen earlier this year to deliver the keynote on June 14. Despite the disruption, he continued his remarks, which focused mainly on optimism and adapting to change rather than artificial intelligence or geopolitics. He did not answer a BBC question about the protest.

The demonstration was part of a wider campaign against Google’s involvement in Project Nimbus, the $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 agencies in ways that harm Palestinians. Google has previously rejected those claims, saying the contract 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 the company’s business with the Israeli government under Project Nimbus. Pichai’s restraint on AI also appeared deliberate, after former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at Arizona State University last month for praising AI’s potential, and Big Machine Records CEO Scott Borchetta faced a similar reaction at Middle Tennessee State University. Pichai told graduates that he had been advised about what not to say, then shifted to a personal story about arriving in California in the 1990s and being told that what he thought was a brown landscape was actually “golden.” “That is exactly what I mean when I say choose optimism,” he said. “Where I saw brown, she saw gold.”