Google CEO Sundar Pichai walked into Stanford's 135th commencement Sunday expecting pushback. He got 200 students walking out on him. The protest was coordinated by Students for Justice in Palestine and No Tech for Apartheid, who announced the action weeks in advance.
As Pichai took the stage at Stanford Stadium, graduates stood, booed, waved Palestinian flags, wore keffiyehs, and chanted "Free, free Palestine" before marching out of the ceremony in front of roughly 20,000 attendees. The target was Project Nimbus, Google's $1.2 billion cloud-computing and AI contract with the Israeli government, signed in 2021. Protesters also cited Google's contracts with the IDF, ICE, and the Department of Homeland Security.
"We don't need another tech billionaire to tell us how to get rich off of the killing and surveillance of Palestinians," Stanford's SJP chapter said before the event.
Pichai appeared unfazed. "What I see in front of me is how graduation should be," he said as students chanted while filing out.
He had made light of the expected disruption earlier in his speech, joking that people warned him it would be difficult, "It is the last two letters of my last name, after all."
He also sidestepped the topic that has gotten other tech CEOs booed at commencements this year: AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at the University of Arizona in May after praising AI.
Scott Borchetta got the same treatment at Middle Tennessee State. OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei have warned AI could make entry-level jobs obsolete, and over a dozen major companies cited AI in layoffs in 2026.
Pichai's speech dodged all of it. He told graduates to "choose optimism," shared a story about his father spending a year's salary to buy him a plane ticket from India to Stanford, and offered three decision-making principles: choose optimism, gravitate toward hard things, and do what excites you. The roughly 200 students who walked out headed to an alternative "People's Commencement" under oak trees, where banners read "PALESTINE WILL BE FREE."
Activist Mahmoud Khalil, detained for over 100 days over pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University in 2024, delivered the keynote speech. Eva Jones, a master's graduate who helped organize the event, said graduates wanted "to celebrate the radical possibility of education rather than listen to an advertisement by Stanford and its corporate benefactors."
The protest follows more than a year of campus activism over the Gaza war at Stanford. In 2024, 13 people were arrested during a sit-in at the university's administrative offices, and a hunger strike for divestment drew more than a dozen students and faculty in 2025.
Microsoft Vice Chair Brad Smith called the wave of commencement protests "a powerful wake-up call for the tech sector." In an open letter, Smith wrote that graduates "who grimace or even boo at references to AI are telling us what we need to hear."
Reaction to the walkout split along predictable lines. Vinod Khosla called the students "biased, idiotic, short-sighted and very selfish."
Rep. Ro Khanna defended their right to free expression. Pichai did not respond to reporters' questions after the speech.
Stanford set the YouTube video of the graduation to private. Pichai's speech is not available online.
