Hundreds of protesters rallied in San Francisco this week against Google’s Project Nimbus cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government.
About a dozen protesters outside Google’s offices on Market Street laid down Thursday on the sidewalk under white shrouds marked with “Genocide” in Google’s trademark colors.
Marching to drums, protesters chanted, “Google, Google, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”
Bay Area Google software engineer and protest organizer Rachel Westrick said a significant number of the activists were Google employees, but an exact number was not available. Workers at the Mountain View tech giant have been agitating against Project Nimbus since it was announced in 2021, gathering more than 1,000 signatures on an internal company petition demanding Google drop it, Westrick said.
“Workers do not believe that we should be contributing our sophisticated cloud and AI technology to a government and military that systematically oppresses Palestinians,” she said.
The protest was co-organized by activist groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Muslim-advocacy group MPower Change.
Since Israel began a deadly bombardment and invasion of Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 slaughter of Israelis by Hamas, opposition within Google to Project Nimbus has “only increased,” Westrick said.
Hamas — the Gaza-based group deemed a terrorist organization by the U.S., Canada and European Union — killed an estimated 1,200 people in its attack, according to Israeli government estimates. Israel’s response, according to the Gazan health ministry, has killed 15,000 people.
Israel in 2021 announced Google and Amazon had won the $1.1 billion Nimbus contract, describing it as a “a multi-year flagship project” to provide “a comprehensive and in-depth response to the provision of cloud services to the government, the security system and other entities in the economy.”
In a statement Friday, Google described the protest as “part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google.” The company said it had been “very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education.
“Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
Asked about the Israeli government’s April 2021 press release on Project Nimbus, which said Israel’s Ministry of Defense and its military — the Israel Defense Forces — would join in leading the project, Google did not immediately respond.
Google said in a 2021 blog post that the contract would run for an initial seven-year period, and “the Israeli government may extend the engagement for up to 23 years in total.”
The protest is the latest employee rebellion over Google’s pursuit of lucrative deals that raise ire and opposition among its workforce. In 2018, after a worker revolt, the company pulled out of Project Maven, a U.S. Department of Defense drone-warfare initiative. That same year, Google’s move to launch a search engine in China that would blacklist terms and websites connected to human rights, democracy, religion and peaceful protest provoked anger among employees and questions in the U.S. Senate. Google said the next year it dropped the plan, called Project Dragonfly.
Google employees’ protest against Project Nimbus, Westrick said, will continue until the company pulls out of it. “This fight against Nimbus,” she said, “is a fight against Google’s interest in becoming a war profiteer.”.