About Sundar Pichai
Sundar Pichai delivered the commencement address at Stanford University on June 14, 2026, during which approximately 200 students walked out in protest. The protesters, who waved Palestinian flags and chanted slogans, were demonstrating against Google's involvement in Project Nimbus, a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. Pichai continued his speech, in which he acknowledged "global conflicts, economic anxiety, a rewiring of technology, information overload" and told graduates that "we don't get to choose the world we graduate into, but we do get to choose how we frame our circumstances."
Earlier in May, Pichai presented at Google I/O 2026, where he described the event as laying the foundation for an "agentic transformation" across Google's products. He introduced Gemini 3.5 Flash, a new AI model, and features including "Ask YouTube" and "Docs Live." In interviews following the conference, Pichai said that AI models three years from now would appear "primitive like a flip phone" by comparison, and stated that while Google's models are "at the frontier in some areas," the company is "a bit behind" in others such as agentic coding and long-horizon tasks. He also said that the timeline for achieving AGI "doesn't matter because the rate of progress means you're dealing with ever more intelligent systems in a profound way."
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Sundar Pichai's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Narrator0:00
Google CEO Sundar Pichai faced protest and walkouts during Stanford University's 2026 commencement ceremony as hundreds of students demonstrated against Google's alleged ties to Israel amid the Gaza conflict. Around 200 students reportedly walked out as Sundar Pichai took the stage while others waved Palestinian flags, displayed banners, and blew whistles in protest. Demonstrators accused Google of supporting Israel through Project Nimbus, the company's cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. That project was signed back in 2021 and is a joint contract of Amazon and Google with the Israeli government. The project aimed to provide AI and other tech services to the government, and Nimbus has raised serious concerns as experts and activists say it has been used to target Palestinians.
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Host0:49
My colleague Romark Sen Gupta, who's our AI editor, is tracking the latest details for us. Romark, tell us what really happened at the Stanford University campus. We're given to understand that Sundar Pichai was booed and students literally walked out.
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Romark Sen Gupta1:03
That's right. Even before Sundar Pichai actually started his commencement speech at Stanford, around 100 to 200 students staged a walkout. And like you mentioned, this has to do with the company's Project Nimbus project which it runs with the Israeli government in association with Amazon. Now, these protesters claim that this particular project, which has cloud computing and artificial intelligence being supplied to the Israeli government, is being used to track people in Gaza. So this is a protest against that. What's also interesting is back in 2024, there were similar protests within Google when there were in-house protests and Google actually ended up firing around 28 of its employees for this.
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Host1:58
Right, remarkable, but also as far as big tech is concerned, there have been other companies as well that have been facing backlash for working with Israel in the past, right?
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Romark Sen Gupta2:08
That is correct, Parmeshwar. In fact, the students at Stanford put out an Instagram post where they urged more people to come forward and protest against big tech surveillance. And they also spoke about the US's neighbors and the fact that the US also uses big tech companies to illegally prey on innocent civilians.
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Host2:40
All right. And in terms of Google's market position, has this been impacted?
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Romark Sen Gupta2:46
Parmeshwar, not that we know of because these kind of protests have become a bit of a regular feature now. Tech CEO going to give a commencement speech, getting booed, people walking out, etc. In fact, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently got booed very badly at a ceremony. Of course, he was trying to talk about AI, and there's massive disdain and anger among the younger population across the world, and more so in the US as it clearly is eating up a lot of entry-level jobs, and then there's also the surveillance angle, which is making people very angry.
