For a decade, ethical investors have argued over fossil fuel divestment — and after all that debate, their portfolios remain saturated with the very banking and insurance behemoths — publicly criticised for years — that finance and insure the fossil fuel sector. That alone is a failure of staggering scale for a debate this old. While ethical investors stayed trapped in it, a second complicity crept in almost unnoticed — subtler, and far more immediate: bankrolling the machinery of state violence, occupation, and automated human rights abuse.

Global warfare has demonstrably undergone a quiet, digital revolution. The machinery of conflict migrated from heavy artillery foundries to the cloud servers of Silicon Valley.

Today, investors who strictly exclude bullet manufacturers tolerate the very technology conglomerates that target those bullets, track civilian populations, and automate mass destruction. Capital pooled by marketed-as-peace-aligned institutions is actively financing the digital backbone of the authoritarian surveillance state, mass mention and human slaughter.

I. The Infrastructure of Global Warfare

The primary backbone of modern military infrastructure is the U.S. Department of War’s* $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC). The contract was awarded directly to four tech titans: Amazon (AWS), Google (GCP), Microsoft (Azure), and Oracle.

The JWCC provides multi-domain enterprise cloud capabilities across land, sea, air, cyber, and space, coordinating military actions with algorithmic speed.

Simultaneously, programs like Project Maven — the Pentagon’s flagship military AI initiative holding a contract ceiling of $1.3 billion through 2029 — process vast streams of satellite and drone surveillance into automated intelligence feeds. The key contractor is currently Palantir. The Pentagon is working with Maven's original contractor, Google, along with OpenAI and SpaceX, companies that have generally taken a more permissive stance than Anthropic on what their models will help with, especially in defense and security. The program runs on classified infrastructure supplied by Microsoft Azure Government and AWS GovCloud (Amazon). By supplying the computational engines for these systems, Big Tech firms have turned war into a recurring, high-margin software service.

II. Civilian Lethality — Algorithmic & Automated

The deployment of automated AI targeting systems across active combat zones like in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and the surrounding region illustrates how rapidly software accelerates lethality while stripping away human judgment. AI-driven platforms process immense volumes of intelligence to generate target lists at speeds that outpace human review, often compounding flawed data and systematically automating the machinery of death.

Project Maven and Regional Strikes: AI targeting programs have already been implicated in identifying and directing strikes across complex operational theaters — including strikes across Iran that hit critical civilian infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, bridges, and energy refineries — in direct contravention of International Humanitarian Law.**

Targeting Systems in Gaza: The operational deployment of AI-powered systems such as ‘Lavender’ by the Israeli military demonstrates the catastrophic human toll of algorithmic targeting across Palestine - on an industrial scale.

Target Identification & Surveillance: Algorithms rapidly ingest surveillance data on millions of individuals to compile automated kill lists, exponentially escalating civilian fatalities and wiping out entire family lines.

Automated Decision-Making: Reducing human oversight to mere seconds per target compromises fundamental principles of distinction and proportionality under international law.

Triggering System ‘Where’s Daddy?’: Specifically designed to track individuals and trigger strikes when targets enter residential locations, this software deliberately calculates when targets are home with their families to execute strikes, maximizing non-combatant casualties and destroying entire bloodlines.

III. The “Dual-Use” Loophole and the ESG Defense Retcon

How do tech giants maintain high ratings in “ethical,” “sustainable,” “green,” “responsible,” “charity,” ESG and similar investment funds while providing software for global warfare? Through a two-pronged deception:

• The “Dual-Use” Technicality: Asset managers claim that software like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services is simply generic commercial technology. Yet investigative reports expose that high-value military contracts involve bespoke, customized infrastructure built specifically to guarantee uninterrupted service during active combat actions and state surveillance. These multi-billion dollar military contracts also allow Israel to bypass U.S. laws, corporate regulations, and terms of service.

• The ESG Defense Retcon: To make matters worse, financial regulators and industry rating agencies recently altered ESG criteria to embrace the arms sector. In the EU, Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/1775 — published in the Official Journal on 30 December 2025 — formally narrowed the automatic exclusions under the EU Taxonomy and clarified that the SFDR, Taxonomy, CSRD and CSDDD frameworks do not, by themselves, prevent financing of the defense sector, reframing defense spending as a contributor to “social sustainability.”*** The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority issued a parallel statement on 11 March 2025, clarifying that its own sustainability rules do not prevent investment in or financing of defense companies.

Project Nimbus: Digital Infrastructure for Occupation

The $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract, jointly awarded to Amazon and Google by the Israeli government, provides advanced cloud computing, machine learning, and AI capabilities directly to Israeli military and intelligence agencies. Investigative reporting exposed highly unorthodox “controls” submitted by Google and Amazon to guarantee the Israeli government uninterrupted operation regardless of political or public pressure. The software enables biometric data harvesting, automated surveillance, facial recognition, and tracking across occupied territories — including the West Bank and Jerusalem — supplying the core digital infrastructure used to target Palestinians (including journalists, doctors, and teachers) for surveillance and killing, and to sustain an illegal occupation and system of apartheid in violation of international law.

IV. The Economy of Genocide

This systemic integration of commercial tech into military campaigns has drawn condemnation from multiple, independent legal and human rights authorities — each reaching the same conclusion through a different process. The International Court of Justice’s January 2024 provisional measures order found it plausible that Israel’s conduct in Gaza amounts to genocide under the Genocide Convention. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, in her own March 2024 report Anatomy of a Genocide (A/HRC/55/73), independently concluded that genocide is occurring. Amnesty International reached the same conclusion in its December 2024 report. In a follow-up report to the UN Human Rights Council, titled From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide (A/HRC/59/23, July 2025), Albanese went further, documenting the direct role played by foreign technology corporations in facilitating and profiting from that same alleged genocide.

The report details how global tech conglomerates provide the digital hubs, cloud processing, and data architecture necessary to sustain systems of apartheid, enforce illegal territorial control, and execute military campaigns against civilian populations. By continuing to supply and maintain specialized cloud infrastructure during documented human rights violations, tech giants do not merely witness war — they profit from an Economy of Genocide.

V. The Blind Fiduciary

The modern ESG framework — originally coined in 2004 under the UN Who Cares Wins initiative and rolled out across mainstream pooled funds over the past years — was designed around static, 20th-century models of corporate harm. It relied on simple negative screens to flag explicit weapons manufacturers while completely ignoring the structural reality of modern warfare and its financial underwriters.

By relying on outdated exclusion criteria, ethical investors remain heavily exposed to the very conglomerates powering algorithmic warfare. Maintaining these holdings makes them passive financiers of the digital engine of war, conflicting directly with core testimonies of peace, equality, and integrity.

The Critical Question:

If our investment portfolios actively fund global warfare and genocide and violate our core values of peace, equality, and integrity, how do we respond?

The investment management industry has a ready-made answer: Stay invested. Use “shareholder engagement” to reform these companies from within.

Let’s explore this in Part 2 and 3.

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* “Department of War” became the Department of Defense’s official secondary name by executive order in September 2025; formal renaming still requires Congress.

** The February 2026 strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killed more than 150 people, including at least 123 children. Pentagon investigators reportedly found a cascade of preventable failures: outdated intelligence, overreliance on Palantir's Maven Smart System, and cuts to civilian-harm review. The key question is therefore not whether Maven was involved, but which part of the system failed. Whatever the answer, the school was destroyed by a kill chain with Maven at its center.

*** The European Parliament tabled motions objecting to the regulation on environmental-sustainability grounds but did not secure the majority needed to veto it.
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Sources

I. Algorithmic Warfare & Automated Targeting Systems

• +972 Magazine / Local Call — Yuval Abraham, “‘Lavender’: The AI Machine That Directed Israel’s Bombing in Gaza” (2024): The primary investigative report exposing the technical deployment, error margins, and minimal human oversight parameters of the Lavender and “Where’s Daddy?” algorithmic targeting systems.

• Democracy Now! — “Lavender & Where’s Daddy: How Israel Used AI to Form Kill Lists & Bomb Palestinians in Their Homes” (2024): Broadcast Investigation featuring primary reporting on automated target generation and home-tracking surveillance integration.

• Euractiv — “AI at War: Five Things to Know About Project Maven” (2024): Analysis of algorithmic battlefield processing, machine learning integration, and the commercial tech sector’s role in modern military intelligence frameworks.

• Military Times — “Deadly Iran school strike casts shadow over Pentagon’s AI targeting push” (March 2026): Reporting on the Minab school strike, the Maven Smart System, and the Pentagon’s internal investigation into its role.

• Wikipedia / Democracy Now! — reporting on Google’s 2018 withdrawal from Project Maven following employee protest, and Palantir’s subsequent role as sole prime contractor for the Maven Smart System.

• Industrial scale - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/10/secret-systems-used-by-israel-in-mass-killings-of-gaza-civilians-revealed-in-new-film

• Laws bypassing - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-and-amazon-acknowledged-risks-and-ignored-responsibilities

II. Cloud Infrastructure & Defense Tech Contracting

• Wired Magazine — “The Hidden Ties Between Google and Amazon’s Project Nimbus and Israel’s Military” (2024): Investigation detailing how the $1.2B commercial cloud contract serves state defense apparatuses with advanced machine learning and data processing capabilities.

• The Guardian — “Microsoft Blocks Israel’s Use of Its Technology in Mass Surveillance of Palestinians” (2025): Report examining corporate policy interventions, cloud API access restrictions, and facial recognition oversight in occupied territories.

• The New York Times — “Silicon Valley Bet on War. The Bets Are Paying Off” (2024): Archived Article tracing the financial and strategic pivot of major venture capital and tech conglomerates toward defense software and autonomous combat tools.

• Common Dreams / No Tech for Apartheid — “No Tech for Apartheid Campaign” (2024): Coverage documenting tech worker resistance and internal corporate pushback against cloud architecture contracts bound to military surveillance.

• Palantir Technologies Inc. — SEC Form 10-K/10-Q filings (2020–2025): Company disclosures acknowledging dependence on AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud hosting infrastructure.

• Nextgov/FCW, GovConWire, Breaking Defense — contemporaneous reporting on the December 2022 award of the $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.

• ABC News, CNN, Bloomberg — reporting on the 5 September 2025 executive order renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War.”

• Maven, https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317998/20260608/pentagon-racing-replace-anthropics-claude-because-it-was-too-safe-war.htm
  
  

III. Legal Frameworks, UN Investigations & Cultural Documentation

• International Court of Justice — Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order on Provisional Measures, 26 January 2024.

• United Nations Human Rights Council — Francesca Albanese, “Anatomy of a Genocide” (Doc. Ref: A/HRC/55/73, March 2024).

• United Nations Human Rights Council — Francesca Albanese, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide” (Doc. Ref: A/HRC/59/23, 2025): UN Report.

• Amnesty International — “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza” (December 2024).

• International Commission of Jurists / Opinio Juris — “Symposium on Military AI and the Law of Armed Conflict: The Need for Speed” (2024): Legal Analysis evaluating International Humanitarian Law (IHL), algorithmic speed constraints, and the degradation of meaningful human control.

• European Commission — Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/1775 (Official Journal, 30 December 2025); UK Financial Conduct Authority statement of 11 March 2025 — both clarifying that sustainable-finance rules do not prevent investment in or financing of defense companies.

• Yahoo Entertainment / Associated Press — “Israeli-Made Film on Gaza” (2024): Article documenting investigative film and media evidence capturing the ground-level impact of automated surveillance and destruction in Gaza.