JPMorgan expands $1.5 trillion economic security splurge into Europe

JPMorgan Chase will extend a $1.5 trillion investment program designed to bolster U.S. economic resilience across Europe, the Wall Street giant said on Tuesday.

The 10-year Security and Resiliency Initiative (SRI) was launched in the U.S. last October with the aim of facilitating, financing and investing in industries deemed critical to American economic security and resilience.

It was announced in November that the U.K. would be brought into the plan, which is focused on several key areas, including supply chains and manufacturing, defense and aerospace, energy independence, healthcare, and strategic technologies like AI.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said in a statement Tuesday that the U.S. and Europe have for too long relied on “unpredictable sources for things like critical minerals that are essential to collective security and prosperity.”

“Now, it is in our best interest to address these challenges together — because our security, freedom and economic growth depend on it,” he said.

The SRI’s key pillars are divided into around 30 subsectors, ranging from shipbuilding to spacecraft, nuclear energy, cybersecurity and the production of high-speed projectiles.

European aerospace and defense has seen an investment boom in recent years, with regional leaders and the NATO military alliance committing to ramping up spending on security.

The pledges are widely expected to boost European firms’ bottom lines, with regionally headquartered companies already reporting record order backlogs and huge upswings in income over the past year.

In 2025, the Stoxx Europe Aerospace and Defense index — home to the continent’s biggest defense companies, including Airbus, Rolls-Royce and Rheinmetall — surged 56.5%, with some regional defense players more than doubling in value.

So far this year, the index has gained 4.3%.

Chuka Umunna, a former British member of parliament who will be leading JPMorgan’s SRI initiative in the U.K., told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Tuesday that the bank’s strength is “built on the strength of the U.S.”

“The strength of the U.S. has three pillars to it: military might, economic prowess and the strength of its alliances,” he said. “And one thing that has become very clear is that the U.S. and the West have become too reliant on unreliable and unpredictable supply chains and sources for those things that are critical to its national economic security and resilience.”

Umunna said in Europe, there will be five key countries that the SRI will focus on — the U.K., France, Germany, Poland and Italy. But, he added, all EU and NATO member states will be included in the strategy.

In his 2026 letter to JPMorgan Chase shareholders, sent earlier this month, Dimon said the U.S. had allowed itself to become too dependent on unreliable sources for materials essential to national security, such as critical minerals, semiconductors and advanced manufacturing output.

“This is us putting our money where our mouth is, so to speak,” Umunna said of the bank’s SRI plan. “Unless you start to invest and seek to develop our capabilities here in the West in these particular markets, we’re going to continue to have the exposure we have.”

He pointed to energy, where the U.K. imports more than 40% of its energy needs, and semiconductors, where Umunna said the West was too reliant on East Asian economies for procurement.

“These are all things we are going to need to scale up and build capacity in,” he told CNBC. “We’re delivering this through the usual global banking products that we would use, but where you’ve got an SRI-aligned company, we will seek to lean in more. For example, from a credit point of view, you will potentially see JPMorgan doing smaller size deals, if they are in this space, than you would otherwise expect.”