Google Workers Hold Sit-Ins to Protest Billion Dollar Contract With Israel

Google workers in California and New York are planning a sit-in protest of the company’s ties to Israel on Tuesday, organizers from “No Tech for Apartheid” tell Gizmodo. The protestors demand their company drop Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract held by Google and Amazon to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli government and military.

“Our desired outcome would be for Google to drop Project Nimbus, and really all support for the Israeli military,” said Cheyne Anderson, a Google software engineer and No Tech For Apartheid organizer in a phone interview with Gizmodo. “How can you stand by and continue to do business as usual with the news that’s coming out of Gaza?”

No Tech for Apartheid expects more than 50 employees to take part in Tuesday’s sit-in between Google’s Sunnyvale and New York City offices. In Sunnyvale, workers plan to do the sit-in inside the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

The movement opposing Google’s ties to the Israeli military is growing within the company, Anderson tells Gizmodo. In 2021, the Israeli Finance Ministry said Google and Amazon’s Project Nimbus would provide the country’s “defense establishment” with an all-encompassing cloud solution. Since then, little information has been revealed about the contract. No Tech for Apartheid seeks greater transparency around how Israel’s military is using Google’s services. A Google DeepMind researcher told Time last week that cloud providers often have limited insight into the servers of their government clients.

Part of Tuesday’s No Tech for Apartheid protest is about reinstating Eddie Hatfield. Google fired Hatfield, a 23-year-old software engineer, who interrupted an executive’s presentation last month by yelling “No tech for apartheid!” at an Israeli tech conference in New York. A Google spokesperson told The Verge that Hatfield was fired for interfering with a company-sponsored event, not for the specific thing the employee yelled. However, Anderson says No Tech for Apartheid views Hatfield’s firing as an act of retaliation for speaking up about Project Nimbus.

“Google claims Eddie was fired for interrupting another employee’s presentation, which apparently is a greater breach of ethics than the war profiteering that Google’s executives engage in,” Anderson said.

Google did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

There’s no evidence to suggest Google or Amazon’s technology has been used in the killing of civilians. However, recent reporting from +972 magazine suggests that Israel is using an advanced AI system called “Lavender” to label citizens in Gaza as targets on a kill list. Israel is known for using another AI system in warfare called “The Gospel,” to select bombing targets in Gaza. The cloud provider powering these AI systems is not currently known, though a fairly advanced computing infrastructure is likely required.

No Tech for Apartheid represents a growing concern within tech about how AI is used in warfare. Time previously reported that two workers quit over the concerns about Google’s involvement with the Israeli government. Tech has always played a role in warfare, though some of Google’s workers would like it not to.