TECH NEWS – Microsoft is taking heat again: employee-backed activists argue the company’s cloud and AI tools could be powering ICE data hoarding and analysis, after leaked materials indicated the agency rapidly expanded what it stores in Azure.
The flashpoint is the scale jump. Reporting based on leaked internal documents says ICE dramatically increased the amount of information it keeps in Azure in recent months – from the hundreds of terabytes to roughly 1.4 petabytes. The concern is not just storage: the documents also reference AI-assisted search, processing, and translation, which critics say can turn a cloud archive into something far closer to an automated surveillance engine.
The worker-led campaign No Azure for Apartheid and allied groups are pressing Microsoft to cut ties with ICE. Their argument is blunt: building or maintaining the infrastructure that lets a controversial enforcement agency scale up its data operations conflicts with public commitments on rights, safety, and “responsible AI,” especially when the platform can be expanded with more automated analysis over time.
Microsoft has pushed back by saying it does not believe ICE is conducting mass surveillance of US citizens, and that such use would violate the company’s terms. At the same time, the company has also emphasized a key limitation of cloud services: it generally cannot see what customers store and how they use it in day-to-day practice – meaning policy language does not automatically translate into real-world oversight.
Politically, the fight is about what modern cloud and AI make easy. ICE has long been criticized for its tech spending, but this episode is less about a single contract and more about whether hyperscale cloud plus AI turns “data management” into “data power.” For critics, that’s the collision point between corporate messaging and operational reality – and they want a concrete answer, not another round of principles.
Whether this ends in a rupture or another PR cycle remains to be seen. What is clear is that the pressure is not fading: campaigners say “trust us” statements are over, and they want an explicit commitment that ICE will not be supplied with the cloud capacity and AI tooling that can scale this kind of system further.
Source: PC Gamer
