JPMorgan Chase announced this week it will invest $1.5 trillion to shore up American security and independence in the face of growing threats from adversarial nations like China. The sweeping initiative, unveiled by CEO Jamie Dimon, aims to rebuild domestic strength across key sectors long outsourced or dominated by foreign interests.
Dubbed the Security and Resiliency Initiative, the effort will see JPMorgan deploy up to $10 billion across four areas: advanced manufacturing and supply chains, defense and aerospace, energy independence, and frontier technologies deemed strategic for national security.
“The U.S. has allowed itself to become too reliant on unreliable sources of critical minerals, products, and manufacturing — all of which are essential for our national security,” Dimon wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed launching the initiative. “America needs more speed and investment. Our adversaries and potential adversaries aren’t waiting — we no longer have the luxury of time.”
Dimon made it clear this is not a public-private partnership but a JPMorgan-led action, stating, “We need to act now.”
China currently produces roughly 60% of the world’s rare earth minerals and carries out up to 90% of the refining, giving Beijing extraordinary leverage over supply chains critical to smartphones, electric vehicles, defense systems, and medical devices. Dimon’s warning comes amid bipartisan concerns about China’s stranglehold on the global market and its weaponization of economic dominance.
While the initiative is private-sector led, it aligns closely with the Trump administration’s aggressive push to bring mining, energy, and manufacturing back to U.S. soil. President Donald Trump recently reversed a Biden-era ban on a 211-mile road project in Alaska — a move that greenlights access to one of North America’s richest undeveloped mineral deposits.
“The project contains extensive deposits of copper, silver, gold, lead, cobalt, and other strategic metals,” Trump said last week, slamming the prior administration’s efforts to block American mining projects under the guise of environmentalism.
In contrast, President Biden halted development last year, citing risks to wildlife and tribal lands. “Today, my administration stopped a 211-mile road from carving up a pristine area that Alaska Native communities rely on,” Biden said in 2024, adding the area needed to remain untouched by mining and drilling.
Environmental opposition has long been a staple of the Democratic playbook. Vice President Kamala Harris once criticized Trump for opening national lands to resource development, while Senator Elizabeth Warren vowed during her 2020 campaign to “stop all new drilling and mining on federal lands.”
But in today’s geopolitical climate, energy and mineral independence is no longer just an economic issue — it’s a national security imperative.
As part of the broader effort, the Trump administration has also taken equity stakes in U.S.-aligned mining firms like MP Materials, Lithium Americas, and Trilogy Metals. Pentagon filings show plans to stockpile up to $1 billion in critical minerals, a move that reflects the administration’s long-term strategy to outpace China in a new kind of cold war — one fought not with tanks, but with technology, minerals, and supply chains.
Meanwhile, China’s metals and mining sector has exploded. In 2023 alone, the country’s mining investments topped $10 billion — a staggering 131% increase over the prior year. That record was shattered again in the first six months of 2024.
JPMorgan’s initiative signals that the private sector is catching up to what national security hawks have been warning for years: America cannot afford to outsource its sovereignty. And as Dimon put it, “This is about resilience, and it’s about security. We need both — and we need them now.”
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