Sunnyvale Google employees stage sit-ins to protest war in Gaza

Amy Larson
·2 min read
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(KRON) — Some Google employees in Sunnyvale staged sit-ins at the company’s offices on Tuesday, including inside the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

Google employees who joined a “No Tech for Apartheid” campaign claim that Google and Amazon are leading “the world’s first AI powered genocide” by allowing Israel to access its technology, organizers told KRON4.

The Washington Post reported, “Protesters at Google’s Sunnyvale, Calif., offices entered the workspace of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on Tuesday morning and have promised to stay there until the company meets their demand that Google pull out of a $1.2 billion contract it shares with Amazon to provide cloud services and data centers to the Israeli government.”

Sit-in organizers told KRON4 that the protest comes on the heels of TIME Magazine reporting that Israel’s Ministry of Defense has access to Google’s Project Nimbus technology and AI services.

One Sunnyvale-based Google employee stated, “As a Software Engineer in Google Cloud, it is horrifying to think that the code I write could be used by the Israeli Military. We did not come to Google to work on technology that kills.”

Sunnyvale Police Department officers were called in to monitor demonstrations inside and outside of the Google building on Borregas Avenue for several hours. Just before 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, officers entered the building to confront five protestors who refused to leave. Police said, “After being admonished by both Google representatives and SDPS, the protestors were arrested without incident for criminal trespassing and booked at the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety Headquarters.”

The Sunnyvale sit-in was staged 24 hours after Gaza war protesters shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and Interstate 880 in Oakland. The highway protesters demanded that the United States government stop all support for Israel until a ceasefire is declared in Gaza. Dozens of protesters were arrested by California Highway Patrol officers on Monday.

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