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Google Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alphabet, has turned profitable at an operating level for the first time ever, despite fears of macroeconomic uncertainty.  

Google Cloud posted an operating income of $191 million for the quarter ended March, compared with an operating loss of $706 million for the corresponding period last year.

The unit’s revenue grew 28% to $7.45 billion during the quarter, resulting in an operating margin of 2.6%.

“We have consistently grown top line revenue and improved annual operating margin, and we continue to do so this quarter. Our growth has come from our deep relationships with large enterprises, a strong partner ecosystem, and our product leadership,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said during an earnings call.

“Over the past 3 years, GCP’s annual deal volume has grown nearly 500%, with large deals over $250 million growing more than 300%. Nearly 60% of the world’s 1,000 largest companies are Google Cloud customers, and many leading startups and millions of small and medium enterprises use Google Cloud,” Pichai said.

Google Cloud’s mounting losses for the past few years could be attributed to the continued investments, especially in data centers. The company has been making these investments to compete better with larger rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

In March, Google Cloud announced plans to open a second Middle Eastern region in Qatar. In October last year, Google announced it would open new regions across Austria, Greece, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden to supplement new regions announced in August for New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand, and Mexico.

Reduced customer expenditure slowing revenue growth

Alphabet’s cloud computing arm continues to see a slowdown in revenue growth over the past few quarters.

For the March quarter, revenue growth for the unit came in at 28% year-on-year, four percentage points slower than the December quarter, which saw 32% year-on-year growth. The previous sequential quarter that ended in September registered an ever stronger growth of 38% year-on-year.

“In Q1, we continued to see slower growth of consumption as customers optimized GCP costs reflecting the macro backdrop, which remains uncertain,” Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said during the earnings call.

The company, according to CEO Pichai, has been trying to help enterprise customers optimize their spending during this period of uncertainty.

“I would add, that we are leaning into optimization. I mean there is an important moment to help our customers, and we take a long-term view. And so, it’s definitely an area we are leaning in and trying to help customers make progress in their efficiencies where we can,” Pichai said during the call.

Google Cloud is growing much faster than its parent Alphabet. For the March quarter, Alphabet posted total revenue of $69.78 billion with Search continuing to be the largest contributor with a $40.35 billion share. Revenue for the entire company was up only 3% year-on-year.

Alphabet, which laid off 12,000 employees in the beginning of the year, said it will continue to hire top engineering and technical talent while investing in areas of priority.

Cloud Computing, Google

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Even though Google Cloud revenue growth showed signs of slowing, it nevertheless provided something of a bright spot as parent company Alphabet — hit hard by the tightening of customer budgets — posted a year-over-year decline in net income for its 2022 fourth quarter.

Fourth-quarter gross revenue for Alphabet was $76.05 billion, up just 1% from $75.3 billion a year ago, according to company results posted Thursday. Net income (profit) was $13.6 billion, down 34% from $20.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021.

The company’s share price dropped by 3.29% Friday on the news, closing at $105.22.

Though revenue grew slightly, rising expenses — mainly for research and development — were a major factor in the steep drop in net income.

One of the best-performing business segments for the quarter was Google Cloud, where revenue was up by 32% year on year, growing to $7.32 billion.

Google Cloud cuts losses

Google Cloud was one business unit that managed to keep costs down, which helped cut losses. The business unit operated at a $480 million loss in the most recent quarter, compared to the $890 million it lost in the year-earlier period. Though cloud computing provides revenue opportunities for Google and competitors including Microsoft and AWS, costs related to expanding and running infrastructure are high.

It wasn’t all good news for the cloud business, however. Even though cloud revenue was up, growth was slower than the 38% jump in revenue the company reported for the third quarter of 2022.

Meanwhile, Google’s total advertising sales fell to $59 billion, down 3.6% from the $61.2 billion the company posted a year earlier. In particular, a slowdown in advertising on YouTube caused revenue to fall for that unit to $7.96 billion, an 8% decrease from the $8.63 billion it generated in the prior-year period.

Going forward, Google is focused on growing its advertising revenue through AI-driven innovation, Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said on a call with analysts after the results were posted.

“Already, breakthroughs in everything from natural language understanding to generative AI are fueling our ability to deliver results that drive meaningful performance for advertisers and are useful to users,” he said.

Google plans to roll AI into more products

CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts on the call that in the coming months, Google will start rolling out AI built on its large language models into its products, starting with LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). He said that both LaMDA and PaLM (Pathways Language Model) would be made available so that “people can engage directly with them,” which will help the company “continue to get feedback, test and safely improve them.”

LaMDA currently works with 137 billion parameters, while PaLM uses 540 billion. In comparison, GPT-3.5 — the large language model developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and the basis for ChatGPT — uses 175 billion parameters.

In addition to growth for Google Cloud, Google’s Other Revenues segment — which includes hardware and nonadvertising YouTube revenue — also posted a revenue increase, totaling $8.8 billion, up 8% from the year prior. Additionally, revenue in Alphabet’s Other Bets, a business segment that comprises projects such as health technology and driverless cars, rose to $226 million, up from $181 million in the fourth quarter of 2021.

On the analyst call, CFO Ruth Porat announced that starting in the first quarter of 2023, the AI subsidiary DeepMind would be reported as part of Alphabet’s corporate costs, instead of Other Bets, where it currently sits. Porat said this was to “reflect the increasing DeepMind collaboration with Google Services, Google Cloud and Other Bets.”

Alphabet’s results come mere weeks after the company announced it would be laying off around 12,000 employees. As a result of those job cuts, the company expects to incur employee severance and related charges of $1.9 billion to $2.3 billion, the majority of which will be recognized in the first quarter of 2023.

Additionally, Alphabet expects to incur a further $500 million of costs related to exiting leases early.

Despite the dramatic reduction in workforce size, Porat said the company will “continue hiring in priority areas with a particular focus on top engineering and technical talent as well as on the global footprint of our talent.”

Cloud Computing, Technology Industry

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In a bid to help retailers transform their in-store, inventory-checking processes and enhance their e-commerce sites, Google on Friday said that it is enhancing Google Cloud for Retailers with a new shelf-checking, AI-based capability, and updating its Discovery AI and Recommendation AI services.

Shelf-checking technology for inventory at physical retail stories has been a sought-after capability since low — or no — inventory is a troubling issue for retailers. Empty shelves cost US retailers $82 billion in missed sales in 2021 alone, according to an analysis from NielsenIQ.

The new AI-based tool for shelf-checking, according to the company, can be used to improve on-shelf product availability, provide better visibility into current conditions at the shelves, and identify where restocks are needed.

The tool, which is built on Google’s Vertex AI Vision and powered by two machine learning models — product recognizer and tag organizer — can be used to identify different product types based on visual imaging and text features, the company said, adding that retailers don’t have to spend time and effort into training their own AI models.

Further, the shelf-checking tool can identify products from images taken from a variety of angles and across devices such as a ceiling-mounted camera, a mobile phone or a store robot, Google said in a statement. Images from these devices are fed into Google Cloud for Retailers.

The capability, which is currently in preview and is expected to be generally available to retailers globally in the coming months, will not share any retailer’s imagery and data with Google and can only be used to identify products and tags, the company added.

Improving retail website experience

To help retailers make their online browsing and product discovery experience better, Google Cloud is also introducing a new AI-powered browse feature in its Discovery AI service for retailers.

The capability uses machine learning to select the optimal ordering of products to display on a retailer’s e-commerce site once shoppers choose a category, the company said, adding that the algorithm learns the ideal product ordering for each page over time based on historical data.

As it learns, the algorithm can optimize how and what products are shown for accuracy, relevance, and the likelihood of making a sale, Google said, adding that the capability can be used on different pages within a website.

“This browse technology takes a whole new approach, self-curating, learning from experience, and requiring no manual intervention. In addition to driving significant improvements in revenue per visit, it can also save retailers the time and expense of manually curating multiple ecommerce pages,” the company said in a statement.

The new capability, which has been made generally available, currently supports 72 languages.

Personalized recommendations for customers

In order to help retailers create hyperpersonalization for their online customers, Google Cloud has released a new AI-based capability for its Recommendation AI service for retailers.

The new capability, which is expected to advance Google Cloud’s existing Retail Search service, is underpinned by a product-pattern recognizer machine learning model that can study a customer’s behavior on a retail website, such as clicks and purchases, to understand the person’s preferences.

The AI then moves products that match those preferences up in search and browse rankings for a personalized result, the company said.

“A shopper’s personalized search and browse results are based solely on their interactions on that specific retailer’s ecommerce site, and are not linked to their Google account activity,” Google said, adding that the shopper is identified either through an account they have created with the retailer’s site, or by a first-party cookie on the website.

The capability has been made generally available.

Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Retail Industry, Supply Chain

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By Andy Nallappan, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software Business Operations, Broadcom Software

Last month at Gartner Symposium in Orlando, Fla., I enjoyed talking with ZDNet’s Chris Preimesberger and Sahana Sarma, leader of Google Cloud’s transformation advisory, about the enterprise software landscape and how it is growing more complex and business-critical daily. Transforming and modernizing software are key priorities for global organizations and critical to achieving the highest level of security and compliance. Many industries, from manufacturing, to automotive or financial service are becoming increasingly software-driven, changing their traditional portfolio mix and business models.

Here are some key points from that discussion:

Investing in R&D

At Broadcom we are seeing some of the same challenges our customers face that lead them to transform their software including: business transformation, talent risks, and managing costs. In a hyper competitive market where start-ups are challenging the established enterprises, companies are looking to pivot their business models through digital transformation. For Broadcom, who is experiencing some of the same challenges, it’s interesting to note that R&D spend has out-paced our revenue by almost 50%. That tells you quite a bit about how we approach doing our business and the importance we place on innovation.

Broadcom wasn’t originally a software company – it started in the early 1960s as the processor-making division of HP – but we got into the software business when we acquired CA Technologies and the Symantec Enterprise business. They were not modern cloud-based software companies and their portfolios were a mix of traditional on-prem software, cloud services, and some cloud-native.

One of the biggest challenges Broadcom had was to standardize platforms and processes of our acquired software companies, and so Broadcom Software worked closely with Google Cloud on this transformation journey, leading us to modernize and transform our own enterprise software. We wanted to standardize and put into a single, cloud-native platform all of our software, where it could give the biggest benefits to customers, and so it could scale, be resilient, and secure.

Continuous Innovation

With our Google Cloud journey, we’ve brought all of our software platforms onto a single SaaS platform. One of the reasons our customers want SaaS applications is that they want to see innovation happening at a faster rate. If you’re using a traditional on-prem application, you have to do upgrades and reinstalls, and it takes years to get it completed.

So as a software provider, we’ve got to deliver those SaaS apps in that space and the new features that go with them, and we need to do them in a speedy DevOps manner. Going to the cloud and modernizing (these systems) enables our developers to deliver all of this to the expectations of our customers in order to help them transform their businesses.

At Broadcom, we worked to give each of our software divisions a single pane of glass to better manage the business and track what was happening from the sales motion to customer adoption to R&D spend.  We also centralized software operations so the engineers could focus on delivering technologies that solved big, complex problems for our customers — in a way we liberated them to focus on great innovations and stronger customer experiences.

Sahana shared that at Google Cloud what they see from their customers when they transform their software is that they get to introduce more modern practices into their technology stack like containerization. So by having a more modern software stack, you can easily add in newer technologies — which introduces innovations. And by developing, adopting and promoting Open Source technologies Google Cloud ensures the neutrality of cloud and helps safeguard investments. Finally, by using Google Cloud as the backbone, you can free up software engineers to focus on new technologies and new ideas since they are not bogged down by complexities of different architectures and platforms.

Exceptional Experiences

Transforming and modernizing your software stack can help customers deliver better experiences for their customers and employees including:

Always available and auto-scalable: Clients deliver improved experience to their end customers with an always available and auto-scalable technology stack to meet customer demands with unparalleled responsiveness leveraging our fastest and safest global networkModernizing applications: Using solutions like Apigee and Anthos customers are unlocking their traditional systems to leverage the flexibility and agility of Cloud. If systems are unified, end-users can get what they need done in fewer steps. It improves the overall experience the end users have with the product or brand.AI & ML: A modernized technology stack allows them to leverage AI & ML tools, making it easier for our customers to anticipate the needs of their end-users to deliver better experience, besides significantly improving operational efficiencies

Reducing IT Complexity

Obviously the benefit of reducing IT Complexity helps customers to see a large range of benefits like faster delivery of products, improved compliance, and higher level of security when they modernize. The more complex your IT architecture is, with different platforms or silos, the more risk you introduce. By modernizing and having an open system, you can reduce IT complexity and therefore reduce risk. Most importantly, a modernized technology stack helps to quickly adapt and respond to the market, economic and customer demands. By transforming and modernizing you can lessen IT complexity and not only lower risk but deliver more success for your business and your customers.

To learn more about how Broadcom Software can help you modernize, optimize, and protect your enterprise, contact us here.

About Andy Nallappan:

Broadcom Software

Andy is the Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software Business Operations for Broadcom Software. He oversees the DevOps, SaaS Platform & Operations, and Marketing for the software business divisions within Broadcom.

Cloud Security, IT Leadership

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Alphabet on Tuesday posted lower-than-expected numbers for its third financial quarter, where it fell behind both revenue and profit expectations. While overall revenue growth slowed to 6% in the quarter for Alphabet, Google Cloud grew 38% year-on-year to $6.9 billion, giving the company much needed support.

“I’ve long shared that cloud is a key priority for the company,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO at Alphabet, while addressing analysts on Tuesday, according to a transcript from Motley Fool.

“The long-term trends that are driving cloud adoption continue to play an even stronger role during uncertain macroeconomic times,” Pichai said.

Google Cloud includes Google’s infrastructure and platform services, collaboration tools, and other services for enterprise customers. Google Cloud generates revenue from fees received for Google Cloud Platform services, Google Workspace collaboration tools, and other enterprise services.

Google Cloud is the third largest player in the global public cloud market, commanding over 10% market share, according to Synergy Research Group  estimates. That said, it remains a distant third in the overall cloud pie, where rivals AWS and Microsoft Azure continue to strengthen their dominant positions.

“Google has to grow more than 50% a year to play catch up. Overall cloud market has a lot of room for growth, and this is the savior for Microsoft and Amazon earnings,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

Microsoft, which also issued its quarterly financial results on Tuesday, reported 35% growth in Azure and other cloud services, slowing from 50% growth seen in the same quarter last year. Part of the problem is the strengthening US dollar, which wiped out about 7% of growth in the most recent quarter for Microsoft’s cloud business.

Google Cloud is the only green shoot for Alphabet

Google is facing severe pressure on its ad revenue, which has slowed down its overall growth to a mere 6% in the third financial quarter, compared with 41% growth it reported in the corresponding quarter last year. With 38% growth and accounting for about 10% of the company’s revenue, Google Cloud is the only green shoot in Alphabet’s current financial numbers. However, Google needs to pull up its socks before even Google Cloud growth starts to slow down.

“Google’s cloud results (38% growth) are better than Microsoft’s Cloud growth of 20%. But with a small base compared to Microsoft and AWS, the growth expectations are higher from Google Cloud,” said Pareekh Jain, CEO of EIIRTrend & Pareekh Consulting. “Google Cloud’s growth rate though slowing down should be higher than AWS and Microsoft. It should capitalize on growth opportunities in underpenetrated geographies. It should also become profitable in the coming quarters, taking some hard decisions like shutting down Google Cloud IoT.”

The global cloud infrastructure services market—which includes Platform as-a-service (PaaS), Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) and hosted private cloud services—hit $54.7 billion in Q2 2022, with 12-month revenue reaching $205 billion, according to Synergy Research Group.

Google continues to invest heavily in cloud

Though revenue was up, Google Cloud losses expanded in the quarter on a year-on-year basis to $699 million compared with $644 million last year as the company continued to expand its global footprint by investing in new data centers and server equipment.

Earlier this month, Google announced plans to launch new cloud regions in six new countries: Austria, Czech Republic, Greece, Norway, South Africa and Sweden, which will expand the company’s footprint to 41 regions globally. This is to counter similar expansion plans from the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Oracle,.which are spending top dollar to expand.

“Our total cost of revenues was $31.2 billion, up 13%, primarily driven by other cost of revenues, which was $19.3 billion, up 20%. The biggest factor here was costs associated with data centers and other operations, followed by hardware costs,” said Ruth Porat, CFO at Alphabet during the analyst call.

“We’re still focused very much so on the path to profitability and free cash flow strength here, but we are continuing to invest in the business. The majority of capex does continue to be for our technical infrastructure. And as we’ve talked about on prior calls, servers really has been the largest driver of the investment dollars,” Porat said.

Google has been consciously trying to cut down its losses across business units, including in Google Cloud. While the losses expanded on a year-on-year basis, sequentially the losses in the cloud business have narrowed from $931 million in Q1 and $858 million in Q2 this year.

“Google Cloud is taking profitability seriously and removing some services where they don’t have the scale and are not profitable. For example, they announced the shutdown of Google Cloud IoT last quarter,” said Jain. “However, cloud market growth is slowing down after the hyper-growth of the last few years. Enterprises are facing inflation challenges and concerns of the macro environment are also impacting their spending decisions. Also, some earlier investments in clouds have not provided the expected savings to clients.”

Macroeconomic headwinds have already started affecting Google Cloud, Porat acknowledged, saying that certain clients are taking longer to decide on new investments while others are favoring short term projects over larger ones.

“In some cases, certain customers are taking longer to decide, and some have committed to deals with shorter terms or smaller deal sizes, which we attribute to a more challenging macro environment,” said Porat. “Some are impacted due to reasons that are specific to their business.”

Cloud Computing, Technology Industry

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Google on Tuesday said it was updating its AI agent-based technology to add an enterprise-scale translation service, and to further automate document processing.  

The services, announced at the Google Cloud Next conference, are being delivered via a new AI-based translation service called Translation Hub, and two new features in Google’s Document AI offering.

The Translation Hub, according to the company, is an AI agent-based service that offers self-service document translation with support for 135 languages.

To translate documents, the service uses a combination of Google technologies such as neural machine translation and AutoML, the company said.  Translation Hub will support Google Docs, Slides, PDFs and Microsoft Word documents.

“It not only preserves layouts and formatting, but also provides granular management controls such as support for post-editing human-in-the-loop feedback and document review,” June Yang, vice president of cloud AI and industry solutions at Google, wrote in a blog post.

Using Translation Hub, enterprises can share their translated findings across the world in a cost-effective manner, Yang added.

At Google I/O this year, the technology giant had announced the addition of 24 new languages to Google Translate.

AI agent to automate document processing

To make document processing easier for enterprises, Google has added two new features to its Document AI service, which was first made available in April last year, designed to allow enterprises to parse documents efficiently and drive data towards the right employee within the enterprise.

Document AI also includes a human-in-the-loop (HITL) workflows to ensure accuracy when needed.

The two new features include Document AI Workbench and Document AI Warehouse.

The Document AI Workbench, according to the company, allows enterprises to custom select the fields of interest while parsing a document.

“Relative to more traditional development approaches, it (Document AI Workbench) requires less training data and offers a simple interface for both labelling data and one-click model training,” Yang wrote.

The Document AI Warehouse feature brings Google’s search technologies to Google Document AI, the company said, adding that the feature is expected to make it easy to search and manage documents including their workflows within the enterprise.

Document AI competes with services such as Amazon Textract and Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer.

Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Document Management Systems

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Google on Tuesday said it would be adding new cloud regions across five countries to meet growing computing demand from customers across the globe.

The new regions, announced at Google’s Cloud Next conference, will be made available across Austria, Greece, Norway, South Africa and Sweden, and will supplement new regions announced in August for New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand and Mexico. However, Google did not confirm when each of these regions would be operational.

The company has already added five new regions this year in Milan, Paris, Madrid, Columbus (Ohio, US) and Dallas, Gupta said.

The addition of the new regions will take Google’s total cloud region tally to 35 regions and 106 zones compared with 34 regions and 103 zones in August this year. Zones offer high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region, and regions are collections of zones.

As of December last year, that number stood at 29 cloud regions and 88 cloud zones globally.

Google and other major cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft and Oracle have been investing heavily into expanding their cloud regions.

In July, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company will launch 10 new cloud regions this fiscal year.

Similarly, in June, Oracle CEO Safra Catz said the company expects to add another six regions in fiscal 2023. By July, the company had already launched two of these new sovereign regions for the European Union.

Data sovereignty adds fuel to cloud region construction

Data sovereignty regulations—rules about data that companies must keep in-country for security and privacy reasons—has given impetus to construction of cloud regions around the world. The EU has taken the lead in advancing data privacy rules with GDPR regulations, and during the Cloud Next conference, Google also announced that it was expanding its portfolio of Sovereign Solutions that can support European customers’ current and emerging sovereignty needs. 

Google Cloud Sovereign Solutions comprise Sovereign Controls, designed to help organizations manage data sovereignty requirements, as well as Supervised Cloud and Hosted Cloud options to help address operational and software sovereignty concerns. To make these controls available, Google has teamed up with a nunber of telecom companies in the EU, including T-Systems in Germany, S3NS in France, Minsait in Spain, and Telecom Italia in Italy.

Economic impact of cloud regions

Google claims that opening up new cloud regions contribute to local economic and job growth.

“These cloud regions help bring innovations from across Google closer to our customers around the globe and provide a platform that enables organizations to transform the way they do business,” Sachin Gupta, vice president of infrastructure at Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post.

The nine new cloud regions that were announced this year are expected to collectively contribute $40 billion to global GDP by 2030 and create 314,400 jobs, a Google commissioned study by consulting firm AlphaBeta showed.

At the regional level, the three cloud regions—New Zealand, Malaysia and Thailand—announced in APAC are projected to contribute $10 billion to the region’s GDP by 2030 and create 86,500 jobs, the study showed.

Similarly, the five regions announced this year across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, are projected to contribute a cumulative $18.9 billion to EMEA’s GDP by 2030, and support creation of more than 110,500 jobs, AlphaBeta said in its report.

Cloud Computing

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A group of Google employees are yet again speaking out against Google’s defense contracts, this time asking the company to shelve its $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract for the Israeli government and military. Google partnered with Amazon to bid for the project.

Under employee pressure, Google has previously dropped one US government defence contract (Project Maven), and shied away from another (JEDI).

In a video posted on Youtube, a group of Google employees including Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, and Arab staff expressed their concerns over Project Nimbus, which they claim will provide surveillance and other forms of powerful AI technology to the Israeli government and military. They are also speaking out against “the anti-Palestinian bias” they have witnessed within the company. 

“By doing business with Israeli apartheid, Amazon and Google will make it easier for the Israeli government to surveil Palestinians and force them off their land,” said the group that calls itself Jewish Diaspora in tech.

While Google said Project Nimbus is a mere cloud computing contract for Israeli government, a report from The Intercept  pointed towards training documents and videos that showed Google is providing the Israeli government with a full suite of machine-learning and AI tools that would give Israel capability to surveil people and process vast stores of data on the Palestinian population.

Google employees’ protest against Project Nimbus has been led by a Jewish employee, Ariel Koren, who resigned from the company this week after protesting for over a year against the project and what she terms Google’s attempts to silence her.

“Instead of listening to employees who want Google to live up to its ethical principles, Google is aggressively pursuing military contracts and stripping away the voices of its employees through a pattern of silencing and retaliation towards me and many others,” Koren wrote in a letter to colleagues explaining her decision to resign.

Koren, who worked in Google’s marketing division, first spoke about the issue in an internal group for the Jewish Google employees, but said she was “put on moderation” by some group members, banning her from posting anything in the group.

She and other employees subsequently started the Jewish Diaspora in Tech group to continue their protest against the company.

As Koren resigned from Google, at least 15 other employees published audio testimonies against the company’s “anti-Palestinian” bias. Many among the activists are also holding press conferences in a multi-city protest across the US.

Tech giants face heat over political disagreements

Political disagreements among employees have been clashing with technology development and making talent shortages an even bigger issue among technology giants who are constantly trying to upend competition with new advancements in AI and other areas.

Four years ago, Google was forced to end its participation in a large US Department of Defense contract, Project Maven, which was supposed to use AI to interpret video information to target drone strikes. Four thousand Google employees signed a petition demanding the company and its contractors stay away from ever building warfare technology.

Seeing those protests, when it came to bidding for another DoD project called JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure), Google decided to stand down.

Similar calls have been made by employees of Microsoft and Amazon against projects that have political leanings or implications on wars. Technology workers across the industry have been participating in several protests as they stand up and speak out against injustice.

While Google has been on the back foot in earlier protests, this time Google doesn’t seem to be backing off as it slowed hiring and pushed employees to work harder.

In a clear sign that dissent would no longer be tolerated at the firm, Google spokeswoman Shannon Newberry spoke to The New York Times about Koren’s allegations, saying, “We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy. We thoroughly investigated this employee’s claim, as we do when any concerns are raised.”

Aerospace and Defense Industry, IT Management

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

A group of Google employees are yet again speaking out against Google’s defense contracts, this time asking the company to shelve its $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract for the Israeli government and military. Google partnered with Amazon to bid for the project.

Under employee pressure, Google has previously dropped one US government defence contract (Project Maven), and shied away from another (JEDI).

In a video posted on Youtube, a group of Google employees including Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, and Arab staff expressed their concerns over Project Nimbus, which they claim will provide surveillance and other forms of powerful AI technology to the Israeli government and military. They are also speaking out against “the anti-Palestinian bias” they have witnessed within the company. 

“By doing business with Israeli apartheid, Amazon and Google will make it easier for the Israeli government to surveil Palestinians and force them off their land,” said the group that calls itself Jewish Diaspora in tech.

While Google said Project Nimbus is a mere cloud computing contract for Israeli government, a report from The Intercept  pointed towards training documents and videos that showed Google is providing the Israeli government with a full suite of machine-learning and AI tools that would give Israel capability to surveil people and process vast stores of data on the Palestinian population.

Google employees’ protest against Project Nimbus has been led by a Jewish employee, Ariel Koren, who resigned from the company this week after protesting for over a year against the project and what she terms Google’s attempts to silence her.

“Instead of listening to employees who want Google to live up to its ethical principles, Google is aggressively pursuing military contracts and stripping away the voices of its employees through a pattern of silencing and retaliation towards me and many others,” Koren wrote in a letter to colleagues explaining her decision to resign.

Koren, who worked in Google’s marketing division, first spoke about the issue in an internal group for the Jewish Google employees, but said she was “put on moderation” by some group members, banning her from posting anything in the group.

She and other employees subsequently started the Jewish Diaspora in Tech group to continue their protest against the company.

As Koren resigned from Google, at least 15 other employees published audio testimonies against the company’s “anti-Palestinian” bias. Many among the activists are also holding press conferences in a multi-city protest across the US.

Tech giants face heat over political disagreements

Political disagreements among employees have been clashing with technology development and making talent shortages an even bigger issue among technology giants who are constantly trying to upend competition with new advancements in AI and other areas.

Four years ago, Google was forced to end its participation in a large US Department of Defense contract, Project Maven, which was supposed to use AI to interpret video information to target drone strikes. Four thousand Google employees signed a petition demanding the company and its contractors stay away from ever building warfare technology.

Seeing those protests, when it came to bidding for another DoD project called JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure), Google decided to stand down.

Similar calls have been made by employees of Microsoft and Amazon against projects that have political leanings or implications on wars. Technology workers across the industry have been participating in several protests as they stand up and speak out against injustice.

While Google has been on the back foot in earlier protests, this time Google doesn’t seem to be backing off as it slowed hiring and pushed employees to work harder.

In a clear sign that dissent would no longer be tolerated at the firm, Google spokeswoman Shannon Newberry spoke to The New York Times about Koren’s allegations, saying, “We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy. We thoroughly investigated this employee’s claim, as we do when any concerns are raised.”

Aerospace and Defense Industry, IT Management