Employees at Google’s offices in California and New York City have staged sit-ins in protest of the company’s ties to Israel.
The Tuesday protests were organised by a group called “No Tech For Apartheid,” which demands that Google and Amazon “drop their Nimbus contract with the Israeli government & military.”
Protesters in Sunnyvale, California, promised to stay until Google ended its $1.2 billion contract with Amazon to offer cloud services and data centers to Israel for the Nimbus project.
The demonstration was also streamed live on the group’s Twitch account.
According to reports, About 10 hours into the protests, police arrested groups of employees in both New York and California.
The rallies coincide with Israel’s ongoing offensive in the Gaza Strip, which has killed almost 34,000 people since October 7.
Nimbus contains a cloud-based machine learning system that allows for data storage, gathering, analysis, motif and feature identification from data, and prediction of potential data and motifs.
A $1.2 billion contract for the project was signed in April 2021 by Israel, Google, and Amazon.
In April 2021, Israel revealed that Google and Amazon had won a huge state tender, allowing it to develop local cloud storage server facilities.
The system may aggregate all data sources offered by Israel and its military, including databases, resources, and even real-time observation sources like street and drone cameras.
Critics believe that the project will enable Israel to maintain its apartheid-style system of oppression, dominance, and segregation of the Palestinian people.
