Big Tech Is Quietly Becoming the Pentagon’s Biggest Contractor
Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex
Anthropologist Roberto González traces the military-industrial complex’s move from the Capital Beltway to Silicon Valley. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google won roughly $28 billion in defense contracts from 2018 to 2022, while venture capital poured nearly $100 billion into defense tech startups from 2021 to 2023 — 40 percent more than the previous seven years combined. González argues that classified contracts and a lack of transparency hide the true scale of this spending, and that the resulting AI-enabled weapons are costly, unpredictable, and unsafe.
This report examines how Silicon Valley startups, big tech, and venture capital who benefit from classified Defense contracts will create costly, high-tech defense products that are ineffective, unpredictable, and unsafe – all on the American taxpayer’s dime.
- abeppu
I do think that for those of us who got into tech in the last couple of decades, the history can be rather obscured, but from the Fairchild semiconductor days, the military was a main customer, right?
I think there's a real question: would the world be a better place had Fairchild and peers e.g. refused to build ICs for missile systems (including the minuteman), for example? Would the same tech have been developed with purely civilian funding? Would missiles built with other tech have caused some awful disaster?
To the extent that the internet descended from ARPANET, and the internet is now both how we access a range of information and also hospitals get shut down by remote attackers, would the world have been better if researchers refused to build it b/c it was from military funding and motivations?
In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people. I don't know that the kinds of things listed in this research are likely to lead to broad other applications in the future like microchips and networks did. But neither do I think it's straight forward to just condemn this stuff as purely evil and say we shouldn't do it.
- chanakya
Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?
- hkchad
Transforming? You guys do know where google got it's start right? SV has been DOD funded from the start.
- slowin
It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this. I quit my job at Microsoft due to their complicity with Israeli war crimes and oppression (and certainly the US government was involved too). It's tough to leave a high paying job, but I feel good about it every single day. We don't have to be cogs in the MIC machine and we don't have to build systems that terrorize people.
- paimapi
some interesting tidbits from the longer report:
>Keyhole, a small San Francisco-based company that developed software for creating three-dimensional models of the earth’s surface [was] provided seed funding in 2003 [by a CIA-backed VC firm, In-Q-Tel], and
within two weeks, military and intelligence agencies were reportedly using Keyhole’s software to support the U.S. war in Iraq. The following year, Google acquired Keyhole for an undisclosed sum. It was renamed Google Earth.
[...]
>A distinctive aspect of the shifting military-industrial complex is the crucial role played by venture capital (VC). Some observers have noted that the rapid rise in VC funding for defense tech firms has been spurred by recent global conflicts, particularly the war in Ukraine, and more recently, escalating conflicts in Gaza and other parts of the Middle East. According to this line of reasoning, the widely publicized use of drones, satellite imagery, Starlink, and other technologies are generating interest among investors, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to a shifting “ethical red line” that is prompting VC to back defense tech startups.
- bookofjoe
>Andreessen- and Thiel-backed defense startup opens U.S. missile factory as it exits stealth
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/defense-tech-covenant-anthem...
- pianopatrick
If there's one thing that should be obvious from the war in Ukraine it is that relying on private companies is a bad idea for certain types of weapons. Specifically, for low margin weapons that you need in volume.
The standout example of this from the Ukraine war is artillery shells.
We should maybe have a state owned corporation for making artillery shells in America, because there does not seem to be enough profit to incentivize private corporations.
- maxglute
Cheap money gone, investor money being burnet in bubble, only thing long term is government money, but gov money still not enough to get US defense primes to make stuff at scale and not SaaS the shit out of hardware (see lockmart f35). I doubt SV will be any different. My feeling is any $$$ US spends on soft MIC stuff, PRC going to acquire anyway and have their industrial base utilize more efficiently. If US tech end up build AGIing, and when US gov as it how to beat China expecting 5d chess answer, AGI going to conclude crippled US industrial base simply can't - it and defect.
- dredmorbius
All that's old is new again.
Steve Blanks' "Secret History of Silicon Valley" details the emergence of that tech hub beginning with WWII and the "radiation lab", which helped develop radar.
<https://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told-you-i%E2%80%99d-...>
Quite a few HN submissions over the years: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=secret%20history%20of%20silicon%20...>.
Those of us who can remember the 1980s / early 1990s, prior to the defence build-down following the end of the Cold War might recall quite a few defence-related establishments in and around Silicon Valley, in its original scope centred on Santa Clara County and the Santa Clara - Palo Alto region.
- gsky
Killing is big business after all