No Tech for Apartheid — Project Nimbus worker campaign (2021–ongoing)

The No Tech for Apartheid campaign is a worker-and-coalition-led campaign demanding that Google and Amazon cancel Project Nimbus — the $1.2 billion April 2021 contract under which Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services provide cloud-computing, artificial-intelligence, and machine-learning infrastructure to the Israeli government and military — and refuse all future contracts the campaign holds enable Israel's military operations against Palestinians. Launched in October 2021 through a founding open letter in The Guardian and a simultaneously-announced forty-plus-organisation civil-society coalition, the campaign operates as the primary vehicle through which tech workers at Google and Amazon have organised collective dissent against their employers' military contracting decisions, drawing on the structural template established by Mijente's No Tech for ICE campaign and propagating the No Tech for Apartheid framing that gives the campaign its public identity.

The Alphabet Workers Union and the Tech Workers Coalition are the campaign's principal institutional anchors within the tech-worker organising infrastructure; the civil-society coalition that launched alongside the founding letter — over forty organisations including MediaJustice as founding signatory and Mijente as the lineage originator — supplies the public-facing support and cross-sector legitimacy for the worker-side demands.

Founding: the Guardian letter and coalition launch (October 2021)

The campaign's founding action was a 12 October 2021 anonymous open letter published in The Guardian under the title We are Google and Amazon workers. We condemn Project Nimbus, signed internally by more than 90 Google and 300 Amazon workers. The letter condemned the Nimbus contract on the grounds that it would "make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians", called on Google and Amazon to refuse the contract and "all contracts that will harm our users," and placed the Nimbus campaign in the lineage of prior Google tech-worker actions against the Department of Defense (Project Maven), ICE, and state and local police departments. Anonymity, explicitly acknowledged in the letter, was a structural necessity in the absence of organising infrastructure that could protect signatories from retaliation.

One day later, on 13 October 2021, a coalition of more than forty civil-society organisations — including Jewish Voice for Peace, MPower Change, the Adalah Justice Project, Fight for the Future, the BDS Movement, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Data for Black Lives, and MediaJustice — launched the No Tech for Apartheid campaign publicly, naming both the demand and the framing through which the worker-side call would be amplified. The campaign's name directly echoed Mijente's 2018 No Tech for ICE campaign, signalling the same logic of corporate-supply objection applied to a different state-violence system — and the same cross-employer, worker-plus-coalition organizing model as its structural approach.

Escalation arc (2022–2024)

The October 2023 escalation of the Gaza conflict substantially intensified the campaign's internal organising pressure. By early 2024 the campaign had developed from an open-letter vehicle into a direct-action campaign with workplace organising infrastructure capable of coordinating coast-to-coast simultaneous actions.

In March 2024, Google Cloud engineer Eddie Hatfield was fired after interrupting Google Israel managing director Barak Regev at the Mind the Tech conference in New York with the line "I refuse to build technology that powers genocide" — the first individual public-protest firing to draw substantial press coverage. The incident confirmed that Google's threshold for termination had descended from the "ethics is complicated" register of the 2018 Maven response to individual speech acts at external conferences.

On 16 April 2024, workers organising with the campaign staged simultaneous sit-ins at Google's New York and Sunnyvale headquarters — including a ten-hour occupation of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's office — alongside outdoor protests at the Seattle and San Francisco offices. Nine workers were arrested for trespass and removed from company premises. Campaign organiser Mohammad Khatami, a Google software engineer who had joined in August 2022, framed the action to Democracy Now! as a direct response to Google executives who had "chosen to arrest workers for speaking out against the use of our technology to power the first AI-powered genocide."

In the days following, Google fired more than fifty workers — 28 initially, then over twenty more by 22 April, including, per the campaign, non-participating bystanders who were present in the offices during the sit-ins. The Alphabet Workers Union condemned the firings, stating it was "disappointed that Google has not seriously engaged with the concerns of thousands of their employees" and called the terminations retaliation against free speech. The campaign characterised the firings in its 23 April 2024 statement as "an aggressive and desperate act of retaliation."

Student organizing and supply-chain extension

Alongside the worker-facing internal campaign, No Tech for Apartheid developed a student and Amazon-facing flank. By June 2024, more than 1,100 STEM students at 120+ universities had signed a pledge committing to refuse employment with Google or Amazon until Project Nimbus ends — a form of prospective workforce pressure that the internal organising model cannot supply, creating a labour-market dimension the campaign had not previously occupied.

On the Amazon side, the campaign coordinated public actions at AWS Summit and shareholder-meeting events alongside the Amazon Labor Union, extending the protest surface from internal Google workplace organising into the publicly visible shareholder and developer-community spaces where Amazon's government contracting decisions face external scrutiny.

Significance

The No Tech for Apartheid campaign occupies a structurally distinctive position in the corpus's map of tech-worker conscience organising. The 2018 Project Maven petition — in which over 3,100 Google workers successfully pressured the company not to renew a DoD AI-drone-imagery contract — is the documentary precedent for tech-worker refusal as an effective strategy at a frontier AI lab. The 2024 Nimbus episode tests that precedent under qualitatively different conditions: a tightened post-2022 labour market, a more explicit management retaliation posture, and a conflict whose political polarisation inside and outside Google made employer tolerance for dissent structurally different from the Maven episode's context.

The April 2024 firings — over fifty workers, including bystanders — represent the most significant documented act of employer retaliation against organised tech-worker AI-ethics dissent in the US corpus, and the campaign's failure to achieve its primary demand through a worker-refusal strategy documents the outer limit of that approach against a well-resourced adversary willing to absorb reputational cost. That failure is itself a data point for the movement: Gabriel Schubiner's framing that "technology workers actually have a lot of power to shift this paradigm" is held alongside Khatami's account of being "called a supporter of terrorism" in internal channels, and the campaign's ongoing student-pledge and shareholder-action track tests whether the demand can be sustained through channels outside the employment relationship.

The campaign's structural template — founding anonymous letter, simultaneous civil-society coalition launch, named public campaign, direct workplace action, student supply-chain extension — is the most fully realised execution of the tech-worker refusal strategy in this corpus, and the No Tech for Apartheid framing it propagates is the framing's primary organising vehicle. The campaign's lineage relationship to No Tech for ICE places it in a direct descent from the 2018 Latinx grassroots organizing model that established the "no tech for [state-violence system]" form — and the two campaigns together document the form's portability across different corporate counterparties, different state-violence targets, and different coalition compositions.