Stanford grads walk out as Google CEO skips AI

Stanford graduates walked out of Stanford Stadium on June 14 as Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet and Google, opened the university’s 2026 commencement. The action targeted Project Nimbus, the cloud and AI agreement that Google and Amazon have with the Israeli government.

Organizers from Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine had pledged the walkout weeks earlier, directing it at Google’s role in the contract rather than at automation or jobs. Protesters left the stadium as Pichai took the stage.

Project Nimbus, announced by Israel’s Finance Ministry in April 2021, is reported to be worth about $1.2 billion. The agreement runs for an initial seven years and covers government, defense and security users. The contract provides cloud computing and machine-learning tools to Israeli agencies.

Protesters argue the services could be used for surveillance and military operations in Gaza. Google and Amazon describe the work as providing routine cloud services and point to company compliance measures and limits on certain uses.

Google dismissed more than two dozen employees in 2024 who had protested the contract. That action intensified campus and workforce debate over technology companies’ government contracts.

Pichai, who earned a master’s degree at Stanford, largely avoided discussing artificial intelligence in his remarks. He drew on his personal story-arriving from Chennai and helping build Google’s Chrome browser-and urged graduates to choose optimism, work on hard problems and follow what excites them.

He joked, “People thought it would be really difficult for me; it is the last two letters of my last name, after all.” The speech did not include a response from Google to the renewed protest at the ceremony.

Pichai has spent the past year promoting Google’s AI products and personalized AI agents powered by the Gemini family of models. The connection between Project Nimbus and Google’s AI work has prompted renewed attention from campus groups and some employees.