Stanford graduates walked out of Stanford Stadium on June 14 as Google CEO Sundar Pichai opened the university's 135th commencement address, protesting Google's contract with the Israeli government.
Why did students walk out?
Students chanted "Free, free Palestine!" and waved Palestinian flags to protest Project Nimbus, the $1.2 billion cloud-and-AI contract that Google and Amazon signed with the Israeli government in 2021. Signs at the protest read "ICE Spies With Google AI" and "Genocide Runs on Google," reflecting objections both to Nimbus and to Google's cloud work for U.S. immigration enforcement, according to TechCrunch.
The walkout was organised by Stanford's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which had pledged the action weeks in advance and held an alternative ceremony in the Arboretum just outside the stadium, Fortune reported. Organiser Amanda Campos told the Stanford Daily that the company under Pichai's direction was profiting from "war and genocide and ICE brutality," and said students wanted "the ceremony that we deserve."
This was the third year running that Stanford graduates have staged a commencement walkout over Israel-related ties, following similar protests in 2024 and 2025, per Fortune.
How many students walked out?
Estimates varied. The Stanford Daily put the number between roughly 100 and 200 out of about 6,000 graduates, while TechCrunch and Deccan Herald both cited a figure of around 200 students walking out, with others booing from their seats.
What did Pichai do?
Pichai, who earned a master's degree from Stanford, notably avoided the subject of artificial intelligence in his remarks, a contrast to other commencement speakers this year who drew boos for leaning into AI talk, multiple outlets noted. Instead, he focused on three pieces of advice: choose optimism, work on hard things, and pursue what excites you, drawing on his own path from Chennai to building Google Chrome.
The restraint marked a departure from his usual messaging; Pichai has spent the past year promoting Google's AI-agent ambitions, including its Gemini-powered Mariner agent, according to a Yahoo News report. Even so, the AI-free speech didn't separate him from the contract that brought protesters to their feet. Nimbus itself includes AI-powered tools that critics say support facial recognition and data harvesting, Fortune reported.
Google has faced this fight before: in 2024 it fired more than two dozen employees who protested Nimbus internally, a move that helped fuel the broader "No Tech for Apartheid" campaign, per the Yahoo News account.
The reactions…
Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla criticised the walkout sharply on X, calling it self-defeating given AI's potential to help what he called "the bottom 3 billion people" worldwide, and describing the protest as biased and short-sighted.
Rep. Ro Khanna pushed back, noting the students were protesting Google's contract with the Israeli military and arguing that, regardless of one's position on those contracts, the students' right to free expression and to challenge authority deserved support.
The bigger picture
This is the Gaza war spilling further into campus politics. What were once back-office cloud contracts are increasingly treated as public moral statements, and Stanford's graduating class used its own commencement to make that point on a national stage for the third year running.
References:
- Stanford Daily, "Google CEO addresses graduates amid student walkout," June 16, 2026; TechCrunch, "Sundar Pichai faces boos, walkout at Stanford graduation ceremony over Google's Israel, ICE ties," June 15, 2026
- Fortune, "Stanford student activists found a reason other than AI to protest Google CEO's commencement speech," June 15, 2026
- Yahoo News, "Stanford Graduates Walk Out on Google CEO as Commencement Speech Sidesteps AI"
- Deccan Herald, "Watch | 'Free Palestine': Why Stanford graduates walked out during Sundar Pichai's speech”