Hundreds of Stanford graduates walked out of Sunday’s commencement ceremony while chanting “Free free Palestine!” to protest Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the tech company’s contract with the Israeli government.

“Walking out of Stanfords graduation commencement because Google’s CEO (our commencement speaker) is a war profiteer,” one graduate wrote on TikTok, along with a smiley emoji, seemingly used sarcastically.

Project Nimbus, the $1.2 billion contract between Amazon and Google and the Israeli government to provide Israel and its military with artificial intelligence and cloud services, was first introduced in 2021. However, the deal drew significant backlash in 2022 when Google and Amazon’s shareholders and employees spoke out against it and its potential to harm Palestinians. A United Nations commission of inquiry has called Israel’s war against Palestinians in Gaza a genocide.

“We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court,” anonymous Google and Amazon employees wrote in a 2021 op-ed for the Guardian.

Then, in 2024, Google fired 28 of its employees after they protested the contract with a 10-hour sit-in.

A transcript of Pichai’s speech provided by Google showed that he discussed skipping class for the first time, choosing optimism and his time working at Google.

A Google spokesperson said Sunday’s protest appeared smaller than students’ pro-Palestine protests in 2024 and 2025.

“In his remarks, Sundar reflected on his personal journey from growing up in India to arriving at Stanford to building Chrome,” Google spokesperson Thomas Schoenfelder said in a statement to HuffPost. ”He encouraged graduates to view life not as a high-stakes sequence where every big moment must be perfect, but as a series of thousands of moments where you only need to get a few right.”

Stanford did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Students have been vocal about their commencement speakers this year. Last month, students at the University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities booed commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances for Tavistock Development Company, when she brought up artificial intelligence being the “next industrial revolution.” Caulfield appeared confused when the booing began. She looked at the other people on stage and asked them, “What happened?”

Eric Schmidt, billionaire and former CEO of Google, did not appear confused after he was booed during the University of Arizona’s commencement ceremony, after he brought up AI.

“So today we stand on this edge of another technological transformation. One that will be larger, faster, and more consequential than what came before. It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have,” Schmidt said while the crowd continued booing. “I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear in your generation.”

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