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big tech
Protesters Target Dutch Microsoft Data Center for 'Genocidal Collaboration' With IDF
"Microsoft stores thousands of terabytes of surveillance data from the Israeli intelligence service Unit 8200—data that is used to oppress, imprison, and murder innocent Palestinians."
Aug 11, 2025
Protesters staged a demonstration Sunday at a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands following last week's revelation that the facility is being used by the Israel Defense Forces to plan genocidal airstrikes in Gaza and to store massive amounts of intelligence on Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories.
Members of the direct action group Geef Tegengas (Push Back) led the demonstration at Microsoft's data center near the northwestern city of Middenmeer. Some activists scaled the roof of a building and lit flares, while others locked themselves to poles and blocked an entrance to the facility.
On its Instagram page, Geef Tegengas said it was targeting "genocide in our backyard."
"Microsoft stores thousands of terabytes of surveillance data from the Israeli intelligence service Unit 8200—data that is used to oppress, imprison, and murder innocent Palestinians," the group said. "Thanks to its Azure cloud service, Microsoft plays a direct role in the genocide of the people of Gaza."
Geef Tegengas demanded that Microsoft "remove all Israeli intelligence data" and urged employees at the facility to "lay down your work."
The group also called on people to boycott Microsoft and support the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.
"We will continue to take action until this genocidal collaboration stops," Geef Tegengas vowed.
Sunday's demonstration followed the publication last week of a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call revealing that Unit 8200, the largest unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), is storing 11,500 terabytes of data containing roughly 200 million hours of Palestinians' phone call recordings on the Azure servers in the Netherlands.
According to the investigation—which involved interviews with 11 Microsoft and Israeli intelligence sources and a cache of leaked company documents—former Unit 8200 head Yossi Sariel traveled to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington in the United States in 2021 to meet CEO Satya Nadella.
Sniffing a lucrative opportunity, Nadella agreed to grant the cyberwarfare unit access to a special area of the Azure cloud platform. The project's goal was storing "a million calls per hour."
An intelligence source said that some of the Microsoft employees involved in the undertaking were Unit 8200 veterans, making collaboration "much easier."
One leaked Microsoft document showed that company leaders embraced the IDF partnership as "an incredibly powerful brand moment."
Microsoft responded to the investigation by claiming that Nadella was unaware of exactly what kind of data Unit 8200 was storing on the company's servers.
Three Unit 8200 sources told The Guardian that Azure has facilitated IDF airstrikes on Gaza, where 674 days of U.S.-backed IDF bombing, invasion, and siege have left at least 229,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing amid a worsening famine and the specter of ethnic cleansing and full Israeli occupation.
Israel's conduct in the war is the subject of an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands. The International Criminal Court, also located in the Dutch city, last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.
Microsoft said Monday that it has launched an investigation into how Unit 8200 is using Azure. This, after the company said in May that an internal review "found no evidence to date that Microsoft's Azure and [artificial intelligence] technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza."
A Microsoft spokesperson said Monday that the company "takes these allegations seriously, as shown by our previous independent investigation."
"As we receive new information, we're committed to making sure we have a chance to validate any new data and take any needed action," the spokesperson added.
The Guardian reported Monday that the news outlets' investigation prompted debate last week in the Staten-Generaal, the Dutch Parliament, where Christine Teunissen of the left-wing Party for the Animals pressed the government on what it is doing to prevent data stored in the Netherlands from "being used to commit genocide" in Gaza.
Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp replied that he would "request further investigation."
"If there are serious indications of criminal offenses in that information, legal proceedings can of course be initiated, and that is then up to the public prosecution service," he said.
The Guardian/+972 Magazine/Local Call investigation follows last month's revelation by the latter two outlets that the IDF has undertaken a "dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon's AWS, and Microsoft Azure."
Big Tech's profiteering from Israel's annihilation of Gaza and occupation, settler colonization, and apartheid in the West Bank has sparked numerous protests, including by employees of complicit companies. At least dozens of workers at companies including Google, Meta, and Microsoft have been fired for Palestine advocacy. Others have resigned in protest.
Hossam Nasr, a former Microsoft software engineer, was fired after organizing an October 2024 "No Azure for Apartheid" vigil for Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Nasr told The Guardian after his termination that he was fired "simply because we were daring to humanize Palestinians, and simply because we were daring to say that Microsoft should not be complicit with an army that is plausibly accused of genocide."
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'Shakedown': Chip Giants to Pay Trump Admin 15% of Revenue From China Sales in 'Unprecedented' Deal
"Is that the art of the deal, or the sort of rubbish you expect from backward authoritarian regimes?" asked one financial writer.
Aug 11, 2025
In a deal that is being called "unprecedented," two computer chip manufacturers have agreed to give the United States government 15% of their revenues from exports to China.
The Financial Times reported Sunday that Nvidia and AMD "agreed to the financial arrangement as a condition for obtaining export licenses for the Chinese market that were granted last week, according to people familiar with the situation, including a U.S. official."
For months, the Trump administration had been blocking these computing giants from exporting their most advanced computer chips to China, including Nvidia's coveted H2O chips, which are used to develop artificial intelligence—a move applauded by the administration's China hawks.
But that blockade was apparently broken this past Wednesday when Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, visited the White House on Wednesday to cut a deal with President Donald Trump.
It is not clear at this moment how the Trump administration intends to use the money, but experts told FT that such a "quid pro quo arrangement" lacks any peer in recorded history, as "no U.S. company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licenses."
Columnist James Thomson noted the peculiarity of the deal in Australia's Financial Review magazine, referring to it as the latest "shakedown" by the Trump administration of corporations seeking its favor:
What we've seen in the past week has been extraordinary. First, Apple chief executive Tim Cook comes to the Oval Office to kiss the ring after Trump threatened to smash iPhones sales with huge tariffs earlier this year; Cook agreed to invest $US600 billion in U.S. infrastructure and even gave Trump a 24-carat gold gift in an excruciatingly awkward exchange.
A few days later, Trump suggested the chief executive of Intel, Lip-Bu Tan, was "conflicted" because of his ties to Chinese business. With Tan reportedly set to visit the White House on Monday night, the pattern looks pretty clear: Trump threatens to hurt a business in some way, and the business does a deal to get back in his good graces.
Is that the art of the deal, or the sort of rubbish you expect from backward authoritarian regimes?
The arrangement is also potentially unconstitutional, as Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution explicitly forbids the levying of export taxes.
But while the contours of this specific deal are unusual, the philosophy behind it is quintessential to how the Trump administration has operated over the past seven months.
Trump has applied similar tactics to his trade war with the rest of the world, stating plainly that countries have "given" the United States money in exchange for lower tariffs.
As part of the agreement made in July, Trump described in a CNBC interview receiving "a signing bonus from Japan of $550 billion—that's our money. It's our money to invest, as we like." Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick described Japan as a "financier and banker" that would pour money into projects at Trump's discretion.
His deal with the European Union has similar contours, with the E.U. agreeing to purchase $750 billion worth of American energy along with the vague promise to "invest" another $600 billion in the United States.
Bulwark and MSNBC commentator Sam Stein noted the opacity of these deals in a post on X: "Where is it going? To our Treasury? How is the [White House] saying it will account for it? Not minor details."
William Aceves, a law professor at the California Western School of Law, described Nvidia and AMD's deal as the most recent form of corporate capitulation to the Trump administration in comments to The Washington Post.
"We have already seen many situations where entities—including corporations, universities, and law firms—would rather accept hefty fines or settle lawsuits than challenge the administration in court. And, significantly, this has occurred even in cases where the administration's actions or allegations have little merit," he said. "It would appear that this is the cost of doing business with the administration."
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The Ideology of Artificial Intelligence
The AI hype is essentially propaganda, the main purpose of which is to accelerate layoffs, to fuel financial speculation, and to divert investment and resources toward a new jump into the abyss by economic and political elites.
Jul 29, 2025
Models of computerization and automation have been developed for over 80 years. A certain sense of the healthy embarrassment led most people involved in these researches to avoid calling it "Artificial Intelligence." In keeping with the spirit of our times, the new techlords Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos have poured hundreds of millions into social media, academia, and the press to promote the "Artificial Intelligence" hype and normalize this expression. But their ideological project is not innovative.
AI refers mainly to text synthesis machines (and to a lesser extent, image and pattern analysis and classification machines for "autonomous" cars and deepfakes). These machines are incapable of producing new information; they don't "think" about what they're writing, using only the probability of what will be written next, according to the databases they've been programmed with. As such, there is no imminent awareness or a new entity that wants to destroy us like James Cameron's Terminator. The AI hype is essentially propaganda, the main purpose of which is to accelerate layoffs, to fuel financial speculation, and to divert investment and resources toward a new jump into the abyss by economic and political elites.
AI's main appeal for the general public isn't even the probabilities that build generally coherent texts and lists, but the language enhancement phase, a new coat of paint that produces an almost human language. They call it "Artificial Intelligence," but the real name is Large Language Model. The most famous models are ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek and MechaHitler (Grok).
Considering the disastrous state of information on the internet today, language models are already suffering from a kind of Mad Cow Disease. Just as cows in the 1990s got sick from being fed bone meal and meat from other cows, so language models are degenerating as they are programmed based on data from the internet, where there is already so much data produced by other language models, in particular ChatGPT, that errors can swell to the point of incomprehensibility. Just as Mad Cow Disease contaminated humans, AI is definitely contaminating us.
The proposal is the same as always: Make the rich richer at the expense of those who work.
The promises that the techlords and politicians who have joined the AI hype have for us are generally false—the good as well as the bad. Language models are not going to end humanity or replace essential tasks in societies and do away with useless work. They are actually creating precarious, underpaid, and hidden work, among other things for the people who have to check that the answers given by the models are in polite language and not like Elon Musk's MechaHitler calling for Jewish genocides and mass rapes. This in no way means that there aren't already millions of people being fired in the hype that ChatGPT or another language model may eventually replace them. In many cases people are then rehired for less pay afterward.
Today's language models don't produce knowledge beyond what is already inside the databases that programmed them. We hear climate deniers claim that language models will solve the climate crisis, but this is redundant. Models based on scientific texts and decades of climate negotiations know how to solve the climate crisis, which has been public knowledge for decades—we need to end the fossil industry in the very short term so solve the climate crisis. Anything else is the ideology of collapse that has been embraced by capitalists. Models based on pseudoscience and random content taken from the internet will spew out garbage in response to any prompt. If what goes into the programming of the models is bad, what comes out can only be bad. So, the point is not that an AI will become too intelligent and wipes us out, the point is that there is no intelligence involved.
But this hasn't prevented language models from being used widely, with unknown and private algorithms, managing huge amounts of data. It is guaranteed that there will be misinterpretations of data and requests that will cause irreparable damage (in health, in criminal data, in energy systems, in the allocation of social benefits, as has already happened in several countries). There will be no one to blame for the consequences, as the billionaires who spread AI outsource their responsibility for all this with the backing of the political elites.
The dissemination of language models on a large scale corresponds to an ideological project of the technolords, selling the idea that humans are just organic versions of computers, reduced strictly to what they can produce. In capitalism, the main promise of AI is the abstract possibility of making a series of jobs redundant or unnecessary. The point is not even to make them redundant or unnecessary, but simply to create the illusion that they can open the door to laying off millions, without even having to prove how AI would replace those people. It's the eternal return to "increasing productivity," replacing labor with technology in theory. To install this ideological project on a large scale, widespread data theft and the end of privacy would have to be normalized, with surveillance systems and permanent punishment for the poorest. This has nothing to do with a great technological advance or any global awareness nonsense. The proposal is the same as always: Make the rich richer at the expense of those who work.
The scale of the ideological project based on "Artificial Intelligence" is catastrophic: firing hundreds of millions of people working in health, education, justice, science, art, public services, and the press with the vague promise of automation to substitute their work. This ideological project would also entail a massive expansion of data centers and network infrastructure, skyrocketing energy and material needs in the midst of the climate crisis. Techlords and the deluded politicians who support them care little if AI language models fail to replace most of the jobs they have already started to destroy. The techlords' doctors will still be people, just like their teachers, lawyers, and information services. For most of the world's population, what could be expected from such a project is more poverty and an incomparable degradation of any public and private services, handed over to automated parrots built with databases contaminated by other automated parrots.
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