Iran Press/ America: Protesters lined up as attendees of the annual Google Cloud Next conference flowed out of the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco for a scheduled 5 p.m. happy hour, having wrapped up speaker sessions and workshops for the day.
Some 30 protesters, including former Google employees and local community activists, chained themselves together on Howard Street, which runs through the convention center, between two large glass buildings, and overhead on a nearby pedestrian footbridge. Protesters unfurled a large banner reading “Google Project Nimbus fuels Israeli apartheid.”More than a dozen current Google workers positioned themselves nearby, passing out fliers explaining their objections to Project Nimbus, a $1.2-billion contract that Google and Amazon Web Services entered into with the Israeli government and military.
A group of workers has opposed Project Nimbus since it launched in 2021, concerned that Google’s technology could help the Israeli Defense Forces surveil and harm Palestinians. In April, Google parent Alphabet reported that its 15-year-old cloud business had reached profitability in the first quarter, followed by a second quarter of profit from April through June.
Workers said Project Nimbus is the kind of lucrative contract that neglects ethical guardrails that outspoken members of Google’s workforce have demanded in recent years.
“I am very worried that Google has no scruples if they’re going to work with the Israeli government,” said Joshua Marxen, a Google Cloud software engineer who helped to organize the protest. “Google has given us no reason to trust them.”
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