Stanford Students Protest Google CEO's Speech Over The Company's Contract With Israel

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The grads walked out of Sunday’s commencement ceremony while chanting “Free, free Palestine!”

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Hundreds of Stanford graduates walked out of Sunday’s commencement ceremony while chanting “Free free Palestine!” to protest Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the tech company’s contracts with the Israeli government and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“Walking out of Stanfords graduation commencement because Google’s CEO (our commencement speaker) is a war profiteer,” one graduate wrote on TikTok, along with a smiley emoji, seemingly used sarcastically.

Project Nimbus, the $1.2 billion contract between Amazon and Google and the Israeli government to provide Israel and its military with artificial intelligence and cloud services, was first introduced in 2021. However, the deal drew significant backlash in 2022 when Google and Amazon’s shareholders and employees spoke out against it and its potential to harm Palestinians. A United Nations commission of inquiry has called Israel’s war against Palestinians in Gaza a genocide. Google also has contracts with the U.S. government, which can use the company’s technology to crack down on immigration.

Amanda Campos, an organizer for Stanford’s Students for Justice in Palestine and one of the hundreds who protested Sunday, told HuffPost on Monday that she has not heard anything from Stanford about the protest, but that any threat of disciplinary action does not compare to what Palestinians are going through.

“We know that this is absolutely nothing compared to the experiences of people in Gaza right now, and the long-standing oppression that Palestinians have faced in the West Bank and Gaza,” Campos said.

She continued: “Additionally, we also know that the many people in ICE detention right now, who are facing truly sometimes inhumane circumstances, their experiences are also definitely tied to Google’s active help ... towards ICE and Customs Border Patrol. Our experiences are nothing compared to the experiences of people in ICE detention and people in Palestine right now.”

Google fired 28 of its employees in 2024 after they protested Project Nimbus with a 10-hour sit-in.

A transcript of Pichai’s Sunday commencement speech provided by Google showed that he discussed skipping class for the first time, choosing optimism and his time working at Google.

A Google spokesperson said Sunday’s protest appeared smaller than students’ pro-Palestine protests in 2024 and 2025.

“In his remarks, Sundar reflected on his personal journey from growing up in India to arriving at Stanford to building Chrome,” Google spokesperson Thomas Schoenfelder said in a statement to HuffPost. “He encouraged graduates to view life not as a high-stakes sequence where every big moment must be perfect, but as a series of thousands of moments where you only need to get a few right.”

Stanford did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Students have been vocal about their commencement speakers this year. Last month, students at the University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities booed commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances for Tavistock Development Company, when she brought up artificial intelligence being the “next industrial revolution.” Caulfield appeared confused when the booing began. She looked at the other people on stage and asked them, “What happened?”

Eric Schmidt, billionaire and former CEO of Google, did not appear confused after he was booed during the University of Arizona’s commencement ceremony, after he brought up AI.

“So today we stand on this edge of another technological transformation. One that will be larger, faster, and more consequential than what came before. It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have,” Schmidt said while the crowd continued booing. “I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear in your generation.”

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