Stanford graduates walk out as Sundar Pichai delivers keynote address

Roughly 200 Stanford graduates walked out when Sundar Pichai rose to deliver the keynote at Stanford Stadium, transforming a polished commencement into a public rebuke of Big Tech’s ties to war, surveillance and immigration enforcement. Students waved Palestinian flags, blew whistles and chanted as they left, turning the university’s marquee celebration into a confrontation over who gets honored on elite campuses.

Stanford said the ceremony was its 135th Commencement and drew more than 20,000 attendees on Sunday, June 14, 2026. Pichai, a Stanford alumnus who earned a master’s degree in materials science and engineering in 1995, had been announced as the speaker on April 2. His presence carried unusual weight for a homecoming appearance: he was not just a corporate executive, but one of the university’s own graduates, returning to the school where he trained before building Google into a defining company of the era.

The walkout was organized by Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine and No Tech for Apartheid, groups that have repeatedly challenged Google’s work with the Israeli government and U.S. agencies. Their protest reflected continuing anger over Project Nimbus, Google’s cloud-services contract with the Government of Israel, and over the company’s broader relationships with immigration enforcement and defense work. The original 2021 deal was widely described as a $1.2 billion contract won by Google and Amazon, a figure that has helped keep the project at the center of campus activism.

Pichai continued the address despite the disruption. Google’s published transcript showed that he centered his remarks on optimism, his path from Chennai to Silicon Valley and encouragement for graduates to take on hard problems, rather than on artificial intelligence, which has become a flashpoint in debates over labor, ethics and the power of tech firms. Stanford later framed the speech under the headline Set your heart ablaze, signaling the university’s official reading of the moment even as protesters reframed it as accountability.

The scene at Stanford fit a broader national pattern. At commencements across the country, students have increasingly turned elite ceremonies into stages for challenging corporate partnerships they see as inseparable from Gaza, surveillance and immigration policy. For Stanford, the clash showed how a university once used to project prestige can become a venue for contesting the social contract between higher education and the technology industry.