BUZZ
More than 100 Stanford University graduates marched out of the stadium during the commencement ceremony Sunday as Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the podium and began his speech.
Videos posted online showed the students chanting “free, free Palestine” and waving Palestinian flags as they left the arena with Pichai’s voice echoing in the background.
Meanwhile, “smaller groups in the audience waved banners, blew whistles and waved Palestinian flags before also leaving mid-speech. Pro-Palestinian protesters condemned the company’s ties with the Israeli government, particularly its controversial $1.2 billion cloud-computing deal with the country in 2021, known as Project Nimbus,” SF Gate reported.
According to the New York Post, the protest was “organized by far left radical groups including Students for Justice in Palestine and No Tech for Apartheid.”
The speech by Pichai, who graduated from Stanford in 1995, was billed as his first in-person commencement speech.
He reportedly did not address the controversial graduation topic of AI during his talk. After the protesters left, the speech went on and was generally well received, SF Gate reported.
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