Google has a contract with the Israeli government under which it provides the country with cloud computing services. Not all Google employees are happy about it.
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Alexandre Koerner/Getty Images
Google has a contract with the Israeli government under which it provides the country with cloud computing services. Not all Google employees are happy about it.
Alexandre Koerner/Getty Images
The first time Zelda Montes heard about Google’s Project Nimbus was about six months ago, although she had been with the company since 2022. The project is a $1.2 billion deal aimed at providing Israel with cloud computing services.
As an opponent of the war in Gaza, Montes said she was shocked. This comes at a time when tension over the Israeli conflict is simmering across the country.
“I think it speaks volumes about how few people at work actually know about this contract,” says Montes, who worked as a software engineer at Google-owned YouTube.
Montes immediately joined a group of Google employees called No Tech for Apartheid, which has been organizing around Project Nimbus since 2021. Their goal is for Google to abandon its contract with the Israeli government. She says the group raised its concerns with Google executives, spoke at company town hall meetings and set up tables in Google offices with flyers about Project Nimbus.
But, she said, “Google was literally silencing our voices in the workplace and not allowing any form of worker dissent to be expressed around the project.”
So on Tuesday, the group went even further.
They staged sit-in protest At Google offices in Silicon Valley, New York and Seattle, more than 100 protesters showed up. A day later, Google fired Montes and 27 other employees from the No Tech for Apartheid group.
It is one of the largest mass layoffs ever in the tech industry and comes as many Silicon Valley companies work with Israel. Some employees say they are uncomfortable with this.
Workers at Amazon and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, have also clashed with their employers for speaking out against the war. Last month, Google fired another software engineer who protested at a tech event in Israel.
A Google spokesperson told NPR in an email when asked about Tuesday’s protesters, “physically obstructing the work of other employees and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies and a totally unacceptable behavior After refusing several requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was hired to evict them to ensure the safety of the office.
Nimbus project, AI and cloud computing
Google, in partnership with Amazon, began entering into contracts with the Israeli government on the Nimbus project in 2021. Last week, Time magazine obtained an internal company document showing that the Israeli Defense Ministry had also signed a contract with Google last month.
The Google spokesperson said its cloud services support several governments around the world, including Israel. Project Nimbus is intended for government departments, the spokesperson said, and “this work is not intended for highly sensitive, classified or military workloads related to weapons or intelligence services.”
The group No Tech for Apartheid says that without clarity on the project, it remains unclear how the technology is used in Israel. They say they fear it could be used in the war in Gaza and used as a weapon against Palestinian civilians.
“Workers have the right to know how their work is used and to have a say in ensuring that the technology they build is not used for harmful purposes,” the group said in a statement.
Arrests and dismissals of workers
Around noon on the day of the sit-in, Montes says she and other protesters at Google’s New York office unfurled a 15-foot-tall banner on an open staircase that read: “No technology for genocide “. (Israel rejects allegations of genocide, saying it is fighting in self-defense).
They sat and played the card game Uno until they were approached by Google security. Montes says they were then told to leave or they would be arrested, but it wasn’t until eight hours later that police arrived.
“It was a lot of weird energy because we kept thinking, ‘Are they going to call the cops yet?'” Montes says of that day.
By the time the police arrived, it was dark and almost everyone had left the office. They handcuffed four protesters who refused to leave the building, including Montes, and walked them to a freight elevator and to the garage where a police van was waiting. The group spent approximately three and a half hours in prison.
A total of nine protesters were arrested in California and New York. It wasn’t until the next evening that Google began laying off employees. Montes says she was initially placed on administrative leave, but then received an email informing her that she had been fired.
The email said she “violated Google’s Code of Conduct” and “Harassment, Discrimination, and Retaliation Policy” during Tuesday’s events.
Several of the fired Google employees did not participate in the protests this week, according to No Tech for Apartheid. The Google spokesperson said the company was investigating employees on an individual basis.
“We have so far concluded individual investigations that have resulted in the termination of 28 employees, and we will continue to investigate and take appropriate action,” the spokesperson said.
Montes says layoffs are a fear tactic that won’t work. “The workers are agitated and we are organized,” she said, and even though she has been fired, “we will continue to organize until this project is abandoned.”
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