Google workers arrested after nine-hour protest in cloud chief’s office.

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Nine Google
workers were arrested on trespassing charges Tuesday night after staging a sit-in at the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, including a protest in Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office.

The arrests, which were livestreamed on Twitch by participants, follow rallies outside Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle, which attracted hundreds of attendees, according to workers involved. The protests, led by the “No Tech for Apartheid” organization, focused on Project Nimbus — Google and Amazon’s joint $1.2 billion contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing services, including artificial intelligence tools, data centers and other cloud infrastructure.

Protesters in Sunnyvale sat in Kurian’s office for more than nine hours until their arrests, writing demands on Kurian’s whiteboard and wearing shirts that read “Googler against genocide.” In New York, protesters sat in a three-floor common space. Five workers from Sunnyvale and four from New York were arrested.

“On a personal level, I am opposed to Google taking any military contracts — no matter which government they’re with or what exactly the contract is about,” Cheyne Anderson, a Google Cloud software engineer based in Washington, told CNBC. “And I hold that opinion because Google is an international company and no matter which military it’s with, there are always going to be people on the receiving end... represented in Google’s employee base and also our user base.” Anderson had flown to Sunnyvale for the protest in Kurian’s office and was one of the workers arrested Tuesday.

“Google Cloud supports numerous governments around the world in countries where we operate, including the Israeli government, with our generally available cloud computing services,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC, adding, “This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

The demonstrations show Google’s increased pressure from workers who oppose military use of its AI and cloud technology. Last month, Google Cloud engineer Eddie Hatfield interrupted a keynote speech from the managing director of Google’s Israel business stating, “I refuse to build technology that powers genocide.” Hatfield was subsequently fired. That same week, an internal Google employee message board was shut down after staffers posted comments about the company’s Israeli military contracts. A spokesperson at the time described the posts as “divisive content that is disruptive to our workplace.”

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