Google has fired 28 employees following a sit-down protest over the tech giant's contract to provide cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli government The terminations come after the group No Tech for Apartheid on Tuesday occupied Google offices in California and New York to protest the 1.2bn contract known as Project Nimbus. Video of the demonstrations shared on social media showed police arresting employees in the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. In a statement on Thursday, Google said that physically impeding employees and preventing them from accessing company facilities was a "clear violation of our policies and completely unacceptable behaviour". "After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety," a spokesperson said. "We have so far concluded individual investigations that resulted in the termination of employment for 28 employees, and will continue to investigate and take action as needed."

The US government has awarded a giant $10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft, the Department of Defense has confirmed. Known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), the contract will provide the Pentagon with cloud services for basic storage and power all the way up to artificial intelligence processing, machine learning, and the ability to process mission-critical workloads. It's a key contract for Microsoft as the company battles Amazon for cloud dominance, and for a while it was up in the air as to whether Microsoft or Amazon would win this particular one. IBM and Oracle were both eliminated for the bidding back in April, leaving just Microsoft and Amazon as the only companies that could meet the requirements. The contract has been controversial throughout the bidding process, and Oracle lost a legal challenge after it claimed the contract has conflicts of interest.