Over 1,100 identified STEM students and youthful workers from over 120 universities have signed a pledge not to take jobs or internships at Google and Amazon until the companies end their involvement with Project Nimbus. Contract worth $1.2 billion providing cloud computing services and infrastructure to the Israeli government.
Pledgers included undergraduate and graduate students from Stanford, California at Berkeley, the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University. Some students of these schools also participated in the Nimbus anti-project so on Wednesday outside Google’s San Francisco office with tech workers and activists.
Amazon and Google are major employers for graduates from top STEM schools, according to data from College Transitions Career Services, which was compiled using publicly available data from LinkedIn. According to dataas of 2024, 485 graduates of the University of California, Berkeley and 216 graduates of Stanford University work at Google.
The pledge, the latest in opposition to Google and Amazon, was organized by No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), a coalition of tech workers and activists from the Muslim grassroots movement MPower Change, and the Jewish group Jewish Voice for Peace. As of 2021, NOTA recommends that Google and Amazon boycott and withdraw from Project Nimbus and any other work for the Israeli government.
“Palestinians have already suffered from Israeli surveillance and violence.” reads the oath. “By expanding the computing power of the public cloud and providing cutting-edge technology to the Israeli occupation government and military, Amazon and Google are helping to make Israeli apartheid more efficient, more brutal, and even more deadly for Palestinians.”
Sam, who asked to be identified only by his first name out of fear of career repercussions, says he signed the letter as a 2023 graduate of Cornell University’s master’s program in computer science and a recent employee in the technology industry.
He tells WIRED that he became interested in acting after seeing friends from college who “privately think one way” but then “started careers at Big Tech companies.”
“I know a lot of people who, not to say they have a price, but when someone looks at the starting salary, it kind of tests your principles,” Sam said.
Naomi Hardy-Njie, a computer science and communications student at the University of San Francisco, said she heard about the letter while attending a school event three-week camp demanding disclosure and divestment from companies financing the war in Gaza.
Hardy-Njie said she signed the letter because Google and Amazon executives were reticent to protesters’ demands. But change, she said, “has to start from the bottom up.”
Over the last few months, NOTA has organized several actions against the Nimbus Project. Eddie Hatfieldorganizer of NOTA, was fired from Google in March after interrupted the managing director of Google Israel at a Google-sponsored technology conference in Fresh York. More than 50 Google employees were later fired following sit-in protests against Project Nimbus at Google offices in Fresh York and Sunnyvale, also organized by NOTA.
Google says Project Nimbus is “not aimed” at clandestine or military work, but miscellaneous document leaks tied up contract to work for the Israeli army. Google and Amazon did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.