Oxford Digital Festival 2025: A Show of Complicity

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The Oxford Digital Festival 2025 took place on Thursday 20th November at Rhodes House. The event this year was focused on AI in teaching, research and administration.

The event was advertised on the Staff Gateway pages as ‘proudly sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Dell Technologies and Microsoft.’ It’s hard to imagine that the organisers, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Digital) and the Digital Transformation team are unaware of the links these companies have to the ongoing occupation and genocide in Palestine, through products they sell to the Israeli government and military. Yet at Oxford, these companies are celebrated as ‘strategic partners’ and ‘innovators’, and their involvement in the machinery of apartheid, occupation and genocide is ignored by senior management.

Tech giants Microsoft, Amazon (through Amazon Web Services, or AWS) and Google have long been accused of facilitating Israeli crimes against Palestinians, including in a recent report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese. In 2021, Amazon and Google signed a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government to provide it with advanced cloud computing and AI services, widely known as ‘Project Nimbus’. Separately, Microsoft provides Israeli government agencies and military units access to their cloud computing platform, ‘Azure’; in August 2025, an investigation by The Guardian revealed that ‘Azure’ was being used to store and process millions of phone calls made in Gaza and the West Bank as part of a mass surveillance programme. Last but not least, Dell Technologies is the primary supplier of servers, maintenance services and related equipment to the Israeli army and the Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMOD), clients which stand accused of genocide.

Thus, the festival was a show of complicity without shame. Among the questionable programming were ‘DigiTalks’ sponsored by the tech giants and advertising their own products, such as ‘AI at AWS: From large-scale to huge impact’ by James Grant from Amazon Web Services; ‘Clean Watts, Smart Bots: Carbon-Optimising AI on Azure’ by Thom McKiernan from Microsoft; and ‘Google's NotebookLM; a researcher's companion’ by Laura White, from Google.

The event also featured an exhibition floor for tech businesses to showcase their newest services and products. Dell showed their GenAI digital assistant; AWS demonstrated their cutting-edge cloud and AI technologies; and Microsoft ‘proudly’ exhibited their close relations with the University: ‘Microsoft and the University of Oxford have forged a strategic alliance to accelerate digital transformation and embed AI responsibly across research, teaching, and administration.’

The University of Oxford has a moral responsibility and an ethical duty to divest from companies complicit in apartheid and genocide. This isn’t about rejecting technological advancement, but rather about questioning the role we play, as major customers of these companies, in the wider machinery of war and occupation. By portraying such companies as valued partners and desirable employers for our students, we normalise the use of new technologies for the purpose of death and destruction, and the continued militarisation of higher education.

We encourage concerned staff members and students to sign the Oxford staff and research students’ BDS Pledge and boycott further events where the role of tech companies in occupation and genocide is not acknowledged or critically examined; you may also wish to write to the Oxford Digital Festival organisers, the Pro-Vice Chancellor (Digital) or the Chief Digital and Information Officer if you’d like to raise specific concerns about the Digital Festival ahead of the 2026 event.

Read more about the complicity of these companies in the ongoing genocide and the occupation of Palestine: