The employees “gave other employees the feeling that they were threatened,” says Google, justifying the move. The Gaza war is also leading to internal upheavals in other tech companies.
Can Google get involved in the war in the Gaza Strip? The fact that the company also sells its cloud services to the Israeli government is increasingly leading to tensions among the workforce. After protests by some “Googlers” at the company headquarters in Sunnyvale, New York and Seattle, the company fired 28 employees who had taken part in or helped organize the demonstrations.
Cooperation worth 1.2 billion dollars
The subject of tension is Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion deal between the Israeli government and two of the world’s largest cloud computing providers, Google and Amazon Web Services. The cooperation has existed since July 2021 and has been the subject of repeated protests since then.
The latest demonstrations were triggered by a report from Time magazine, according to which Google recently expanded its cooperation in the wake of the Gaza war. According to internal documents, not only the Israeli government, but also the Israeli Ministry of Defense, to which the military reports, has its own access to Google’s cloud infrastructure. In addition, Google advised the Ministry of Defense on expanding its cloud access and charged a reduced amount for this advice because the existing “Nimbus” framework agreement already exists.
The research also suggests that the cloud computing infrastructure in question may be helping the Israeli military’s artificially intelligent systems select the targets for Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza. Google employees told Time that the company has little control over the specific purposes for which its customers use the cloud infrastructure.
Google Cloud CEO’s office occupied
As a result, employees protested for ten hours at Google’s headquarters on Tuesday. Among other things, the demonstrators occupied the office of the CEO of the Google Cloud division, Thomas Kurian, at the company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale. Occasionally, pro-Israel supporters took part in counter-demonstrations. According to the company, property was damaged and other employees were prevented from doing their work. Police arrested nine demonstrators late in the evening because they did not want to vacate the company headquarters voluntarily.
Behind the protests is the group “No Tech for Apartheid”, which includes several Google and Amazon employees and which has been protesting against the “Nimbus” project for three years.
The protests at Google are particularly notable because the company is known more than other tech companies for its open culture. Employees are generally encouraged to criticize managers and to openly express their ethnic origins and sexual identification. Many Google employees hate the idea that their employer could indirectly participate in wars. They point to the company’s long-standing motto “Don’t be evil” and the proclaimed claim to use technology for good, which contradicts cooperation with the military. At the beginning of the 2000s, then-CEO Eric Schmidt once described the company culture like this: “At Google, a lot revolves around the fact that the people who work here think they are still at university.”
Apparently, however, a turning point is coming at Google. CEO Sundar Pichai found clear words in a blog post on Thursday. Google is “a business and not the place to (…) argue about polarizing problems or discuss politics.” With a view to current developments in AI, Pichai wrote that the current time is too important for Google to allow the company to be distracted.
In 2018, Google gave in to pressure from employees on the “Maven” project
Protests against Google’s support for the Israeli government have been flaring up again and again for some time: after the cooperation on the “Nimbus” project was signed in 2021, hundreds of employees protested against it in an open letter. Even after the outbreak of the most recent Gaza war, several hundred demonstrators gathered in front of Google’s offices in San Francisco in mid-December 2023 and held posters demanding the end of the “Nimbus” project. And Google recently terminated an employee because he interrupted an Israeli Google manager’s lecture at a technology conference in New York in March with shouts of protest.
It is also not the first time that collaborations between Google and the military have led to tensions with the workforce. In 2018 it became known that the company was supporting the American military’s “Maven” project; The aim was to improve the Pentagon’s drone technology and, using artificial intelligence, to be able to kill terrorists more specifically with drones, among other things. Almost 4,000 Googlers called on CEO Sundar Pichai to end the cooperation; Around a dozen employees resigned out of outrage over the collaboration.
At that time, the top management gave in and did not extend the – quite lucrative – contract with the Pentagon. But a lot has changed since 2018. This time the top management seems willing to withstand the pressure from the workforce. In a company-wide email from which the Wall Street Journal quoted, Google manager Chris Rackow, who is responsible for global security, wrote this week that the protests were “unacceptable, extremely disruptive” and had “made employees feel like they were are threatened.” “If you are one of the few who think we would ignore behavior like this that violates our company policies, think again.”
The group “No Tech for Apartheid,” in turn, criticized the layoffs as a “vile form of retaliation.” Google employees have the right to peacefully protest the circumstances and conditions of their work, it said.
Google, in turn, stated in a statement on Thursday that the contract for the “Nimbus” project “does not cover sensitive, highly confidential or military content that is relevant to weapons or the work of secret services.”
The war in Gaza is also triggering internal tensions at other technology companies. Around 400 Apple employees recently called on CEO Tim Cook and management in an open letter to finally take a public stance on the Gaza war and condemn the suffering of the Palestinians. And Microsoft and Meta have removed posts from employees in internal chat forums that revolved around the Gaza war, reports the New York Times.