Google employees staged sit-ins at two of the tech giant's offices in California and New York City, protesting the company's ties with Israel.
Led by a group called "No Tech For Apartheid," the protests demanded that Google and Amazon terminate their Nimbus contract with the Israeli government and military.
In Sunnyvale, California, protesters vowed to continue their sit-in until Google ends its $1.2 billion contract with Amazon, which would provide cloud services and data centers to Israel for the Nimbus project.
The protest was livestreamed on the group's Twitch channel.
About 10 hours into the protests, police arrested groups of employees in both New York and California, the group reported.
The protests also coincide with Israel’s continuing offensive on the Gaza Strip, which since Oct. 7 has killed nearly 34,000 Palestinian lives, mainly women and children.
Nimbus includes a cloud and machine learning system that enables data storage, collection, 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 between Israel and Google and Amazon.
Israel announced in April 2021 that Google and Amazon won the massive state tender, allowing Israel to establish its local cloud storage server centers.
The system can collect all data sources provided by Israel and its military, including databases, resources and even live observation sources such as street and drone cameras.
Critics argue that the project could help Israel continue its apartheid-like system of oppression, domination and segregation of the Palestinian people.
