No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), a coalition of tech workers demanding big tech companies to drop their contracts with the Israeli government, is close to reaching its goal for a campaign asking students not to work with Google and Amazon. As Wired reports, more than 1,100 people who identified themselves as STEM students and young workers have taken the pledge to refuse jobs from the companies “for powering Israel’s Apartheid system and genocide against Palestinians.” Based on its website, NOTA’s goal is to gather 1,200 signatures for the campaign.
“As young people and students in STEM and beyond, we refuse to have any part in these horrific abuses. We’re joining the #NoTechForApartheid campaign to demand Amazon and Google immediately end Project Nimbus,” part of the pledge reads. Google and Amazon won a $1.2 billion contract under Project Nimbus to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence services. A Google spokesperson previously denied that the company’s Nimbus contract deals with “highly sensitive, classified or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
As two of the biggest tech companies on the planet, Google and Amazon are also two of the biggest employees of STEM graduates. Wired says the campaign’s pledgers include undergraduate and graduate students from Stanford, UC Berkeley, the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University — institutions located in the same state as Google’s HQ.
NOTA had also organized actions protesting tech companies’ involvement with Israel in the past, including sit-ins and office takeovers that had led Google to fire dozens of workers. In March, one of its organizers was fired from Google after interrupting one of its executives at an Israeli tech conference in New York and loudly proclaiming that he refuses to “build technology that powers genocide or surveillance.”