More than 1,100 STEM students and young workers from over 120 universities have signed a pledge not to take jobs or internships with Google or Amazon until the companies’ involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services and infrastructure to the Israeli government, ends.
Pledgers included undergraduate and graduate students from Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University, some of whom joined tech employees and activists at a rally against Project Nimbus outside Google’s San Francisco offices on Wednesday.
Amazon and Google are the top employers for graduates of top STEM schools, according to data from career service College Transitions compiled using publicly available data from LinkedIn: As of 2024, 485 UC Berkeley graduates and 216 Stanford University graduates worked at Google, according to the data.
The pledge, the latest backlash against Google and Amazon, was organized by No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), a coalition of tech workers and activists in partnership with Muslim grassroots groups MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace, which has been calling on Google and Amazon since 2021 to boycott and divest from Project Nimbus and all other work for the Israeli government.
“Palestinians are already being harmed by Israeli surveillance and violence,” the pledge reads. “By expanding their public cloud computing capacity and providing cutting-edge technology to the Israeli occupying government and military, Amazon and Google are helping make Israeli apartheid more efficient, more violent, and more deadly to Palestinians.”
Sam, who asked to only give his first name for fear of professional repercussions, said he signed the letter as a 2023 graduate of Cornell University’s master’s in computer science program and a recent joiner of the tech industry.
He told WIRED that he was inspired to take action after seeing some of his friends from grad school “privately thinking the same thing” but “going on to have careers at big tech companies.”
“I know a lot of people who, not to say they can put a price on it, would have their faith tested a little bit when they saw their starting salary,” Sam said.
Naomi Hadi N’Jie, a communications major and computer science minor at the University of San Francisco, said she learned about the letter while attending a three-week camp at her school calling for disclosure and divestment from companies funding the Gaza war.
Hadi N’Djie said she signed the letter because executives at Google and Amazon were unwilling to meet the demands of protesters, but change “must start from the bottom,” she said.
NOTA has organized several actions targeting Project Nimbus over the past few months. NOTA organizer Eddie Hatfield was fired by Google in March after interrupting Google’s Israeli managing director at a Google-sponsored tech conference in New York. Subsequent sit-ins against Project Nimbus at Google offices in New York and Sunnyvale, which led to the firing of over 50 Google employees, were also organized by NOTA.
Google has insisted that Project Nimbus is not classified or military in nature, but various leaked documents have linked the contract to work for the Israeli military. Google and Amazon did not immediately respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.
