Some singers have already withdrawn their music from Spotify, and campaigns have been launched on social media to cancel subscriptions to the platform, based on the idea that continuing to pay for the platform would be tantamount, at least indirectly, to contributing to the financing of a military company. All it took was the news that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek had invested €600 million in Helsing, a German start-up specialising in military technology that develops drones and defence systems based on artificial intelligence. Spotify responded by emphasising that the company operates separately from Helsing.
At the same time, in this week’s editorial, we highlighted how a narrative is spreading, originating from a series of articles appearing in many media outlets, which emphasise how the Israeli state’s economy has been improving since the campaign to invade and destroy Palestine began:
One of these articles, published a few days ago in an Italian financial newspaper, had a headline highlighting how the Israeli stock market has been steadily rising over the last two years, i.e. since the invasion of Gaza began, and how start-ups are growing – according to the headline – ‘despite the war’. And this is where the mistake lies: start-ups based in Israel are not growing despite the war, they are growing precisely because there is a war.”
If one were to defend the logic and position taken by musicians and Spotify users who want nothing to do with this platform because it profits from war, the same reasoning could be extended both to the root cause – investment funds and investors who invest in start-ups that develop such platforms – and to current and future European start-ups.
In this other article, we denounced the concept of “dual use”, i.e. technologies that can be valuable and useful for both civilian and military purposes. This concept is used by the European Investment Bank (EIB) itself, which, if before It was unable to finance the defence sector, but now, thanks to this concept, it has been able to update its rules for financing SMEs in the security and defence sector, opening up credit lines dedicated to a large number of small businesses and innovative start-ups that need financing for dual-use projects.
All this developed with the launch of Rearm Europe, which would allocate part of the €800 billion to start-ups whose core business lies in civil and military applications.
Obviously, it is one thing to invest in defence technology companies located in countries that want war, but quite another to invest in countries that want to defend themselves against it.
However, if we were to validate the reasoning behind boycotting Spotify, i.e. no longer wanting to use a platform because either it or its founder would somehow profit from the war, we would have to apply the same rhetoric to other platforms.
So we should no longer use Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, LinkedIn, Amazon, TikTok, ChatGPT, YouTube – or Google (Alphabet) in general.
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an international organisation committed to fighting injustice globally, has compiled a list of “Companies profiting from the Israeli attacks on Gaza in 2023-2024″. This list includes Microsoft (and therefore ChatGpt), Alphabet (and therefore YouTube, etc.) and Amazon.
Alphabet (Google) and Amazon
Project Nimbus is a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2022 between the Israeli government and Google and AWS for cloud/AI services for ministries and the armed forces. So far, it has been widely debated both internally and externally through protests and sit-ins. For these reasons, in 2024, Google itself dismissed employees who protested against the project. On that occasion, Google stated that it had dismissed other employees after the investigation gathered details from colleagues who had suffered ‘physical disturbances’ and identified employees who wore masks and did not carry their badges to hide their identity. It never specified how many were dismissed.
Microsoft
Since 2016, any capital for LinkedIn has come from Microsoft. Although there have been no direct investments by Microsoft in ‘war-tech’ start-ups (drones, counter-drones, weapon systems, etc.) in the last two years, there has been indirect/commercial involvement: the provision of cloud/AI services (Azure) to the Israeli Ministry of Defence/IDF by Microsoft during the war in Gaza and the opening of the ‘Israel Central’ cloud region. Of course, these are not equity investments in start-ups, but service and cloud infrastructure contracts. The Guardian reported $10 million in technical support/services. Microsoft has acknowledged the provision but claims to have no evidence of use to cause harm to civilians.
OpenAI
Microsoft has invested tens of billions in OpenAI (the producer of ChatGPT) from 2019 to 2023 and has an agreement that makes it one of the main stakeholders. Microsoft holds a substantial stake in OpenAI’s for-profit vehicles. Some sources speak of a stake of around 49% in OpenAI’s for-profit vehicle (OpenAI Global/OpenAI LP) under the terms of the profit-sharing agreements.
In February 2024, around 30 activists gathered at the entrance to OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco after the company quietly removed the ban on ‘military and warfare use’ from its usage policies the previous month. OpenAI later confirmed that it was collaborating with the US Department of Defence on open source software solutions for cybersecurity.
Meta
The company that owns the social networks WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook received complaints from NGOs and media outlets about bias and excessive removal of pro-Palestinian content in 2023–2024.
To date, both Meta and Alphabet continue to have offices and research and development teams in Tel Aviv/Jaffa and Haifa. Only recently, in 2024, was Verily (Alphabet group) closed.
Telegram
BlackRock was listed among the subscribers to the Telegram 2025 bond. The iShares MSCI Israel ETF (EIS) is managed by BlackRock and provides broad-market exposure to Israeli equities, including listed defence companies such as Elbit Systems (i.e. indirect exposure via the public market, not venture capital). An ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) is a fund listed on the stock exchange that replicates an index (e.g. S&P500, MSCI Israel, etc.). It works like a ‘basket’ of shares: if you buy the ETF, you own a small portion of all the shares in that basket. ETFs usually have low costs and are used by institutional and retail investors to gain quick exposure to a market. “Broad-market” means that the ETF does not select a few specific companies, but replicates an entire market or broad sector. For example: the iShares MSCI Israel ETF (ticker: EIS) replicates the MSCI Israel index, i.e. it includes most Israeli companies listed on the Tel Aviv or Wall Street stock exchanges. It includes banks, hi-tech, telecommunications, energy, and even defence companies (such as Elbit Systems). It is not a ‘thematic’ fund (focusing only on defence or only on technology), but a fund that tracks the entire Israeli stock market. In short, when BlackRock bought the EIS ETF, it automatically bought shares in Elbit Systems (defence), as well as in Israeli banks, telecoms and tech start-ups listed on the stock exchange. BlackRock did not explicitly decide to invest in Elbit: it does so because the ETF tracks the Israeli market as a whole.
Numbers and start-ups
That is why, in just one year, the landscape of Israeli start-ups in the defence technology sector has almost doubled. In 2024, there were 160 start-ups related to the defence sector. Today, that number stands at 312, with a growth rate of 95%, far exceeding that of the United States (17%) and the United Kingdom (20%) over the same period.
That is why, in the first six months of 2025, venture capital funds invested around €946.3 million in European defence/military tech start-ups — a significant increase on the previous year.
That is why Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer at Meta Platforms, said that “the tide has turned” in Silicon Valley and that it has become more appealing for the technology industry to support the efforts of the US military.
That is why Meta announced yesterday that it will extend access to Llama models (open source LLM models freely available on the Hugging Face platform, ed.) to defence agencies in allied countries (EU, Japan, NATO) for national/security purposes. (photo by Tong Su on Unsplash)
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