Climate justice activists gather in Houston, TX, to confront corporations and billionaires investing in fossil fuels. (Credit: Lauren Parker)
The past several years have seen heightened organizing campaigns around Citibank — also known as Citi or Citigroup — which is the third-largest U.S. bank after JPMorgan and Bank of America. Many activists and communities argue that Citi is propping up numerous harms through its financing activities.
For example, in the face of intensifying climate chaos, Citi is the second-largest financier of fossil fuels since 2021, providing a whopping $160.6 billion to the industry during that time. It’s also a major financier of Liquefied Natural Gas (methane gas) infrastructure in the Texas and Louisiana towns of Cameron, Corpus Christi, Port Arthur, and Sabine Pass.
Many activists have also pointed out Citi’s long ties to militarism and occupation. The bank is part of multi-billion dollar lending agreements to top weapons manufacturers and has also helped underwrite billions in corporate bonds from weapons companies. Citi was the last U.S. bank to leave apartheid South Africa, while the bank that became Citi propelled the U.S. occupation and immiseration of Haiti. Citi has long financed the weapons companies that supply Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian land and its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
In response, numerous campaigns have arisen over the past several years to challenge Citi’s ties to the climate crisis and militarism.
These include efforts waged by the Youth Climate Finance Alliance against Citi’s “fossil imperialism,” as well as campaigns by the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition to get Citi to stop financing fossil fuels and to pressure Costco to drop Citi as a credit card partner. Activists have also staged numerous protests focused on Citi, including demonstrations and direct actions at Citi’s corporate headquarters in New York City — with one protester even being physically attacked by a Citi employee — as well as near the home of Citi CEO Jane Fraser, who has raked in over $152 million in compensation over just the past three years alone, including an astounding $95.7 million in 2025.
The organizations Banking on Solidarity and Visualizing Palestine have also focused on Citi’s ties to war and militarism, especially its financial ties to Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians.
Today, two major areas of corporate profiteering — that of weapons companies, and of artificial intelligence companies and the data centers that power their operations — increasingly sit at a nexus driving harms tied to environmental injustice and war and militarism. Weapons companies directly enable and profit from war and occupation, while AI and data centers gobble up land, water, and energy, including fossil fuel-generated power, and also are increasingly applied to warfare, including illegal and genocidal military campaigns.
Indeed, the weapons industry on the one hand, and AI and data centers on the other, are increasingly interlocked, as seen in the rise of firms like Anduril and Palantir — the latter being a company that Citi has financial ties with, as we’ll discuss below.
Citi’s Governing Interlocks with Weapons Companies and AI
Citi’s top governing body — its board of directors — has close corporate interlocks with militarism and data centers.
James S. Turley has sat on Citi’s board since 2013. During most of that time — since 2015 — Turley has also sat on the board of Northrop Grumman, the world’s fourth-largest weapons company.
Nor is Turley an ordinary board member of Northrop Grumman: he was recently named Northrop’s Lead Independent Director, meaning Turley will hold numerous leadership roles within the governing body.
Northrop Grumman reported $42 billion in sales in 2025 and $9.9 billion in sales in the first quarter of 2026. The company’s stock soared with the onset of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran.
Citi’s Turley raked in $347,042 in total compensation in 2025 alone for his board role with Northrop. As of May 2026, Turley also owns over $3.7 million in Northrop stock.
According to the American Friend Service Committee’s Investigate database, Northrop’s weapons system has been used in war crimes committed against Palestinians and in intensifying the militarization of the U.S. border. Northrop also produces the B-2 stealth bombers, costing $2 billion each, that were used against Iran.
In addition to this interlock with a top weapons company through Turley, Citi’s board of directors is widely interwoven with companies to data centers and artificial intelligence. For example:
- Citi board director Diana L. Taylor is also a director of Brookfield Corporation, an investment firm that launched a $100 billion AI and data center program in 2025.
- Citi board director Gary M. Reiner is also a director of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which does extensive business in artificial intelligence and data centers.
- Citi board director Peter B. Henry is also a director of Analog Devices, a semiconductor company that works with data centers and artificial intelligence.
- Citi board director James Turley is the board chair of Emerson Electric, which provides technologies for data centers and artificial intelligence.
- Citi board director Titi Cole is also a director of Datadog, a digital services company that is building a data center in Australia, expanding their footprint beyond existing locations in North America, Asia, and Europe.
Additionally, Citi board director Renée J. James is a technology executive with ties to artificial intelligence and data centers companies. For example, she is a recent former board member of AI giant Oracle and a past board member of Vodafone Group, which does business in data centers. From 2016 to 2025, James was also an executive at Carlyle Group, a private equity giant that is a major financier of data centers and has a history of investing in defense companies.
Citi’s Extensive Business with Weapons Companies and AI
Beyond the interlocks of its board directors, Citi also has direct and extensive business with weapons companies and artificial intelligence and data centers.
Citi profits from weapons companies in several ways. One is through providing credit facilities to core companies within the military-industrial complex. Through these credit facilities, big defense companies can freely borrow huge sums of money when needed.
Credit agreements for weapons companies
For example, Citibank is one of the lenders behind a $3 billion credit agreement for Lockheed Martin, the world’s top weapons corporation and the largest Pentagon contractor.
Lockheed’s stock price soared with the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. According to Responsible Statecraft, Lockheed “makes the THAAD system which has been used to intercept Iranian missiles,” and in January 2026, Lockheed “signed a deal with the Pentagon to quadruple production of the THAAD interceptors — which each cost $12.77 million — from 96 to 400 per year.”
Earlier this year, in February 2026, Lockheed Martin Chairman and CEO Jim Taiclet and Chief Financial Officer Evan Scott were scheduled to participate in a “fireside chat” at Citi’s 2026 Global Industrial Tech and Mobility Conference.
Citi is also a lender in revolving credit agreements for Palantir Technologies, the data analytics company whose products have been used to drive ICE’s detention and deportation machinery and, many speculate, Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For example, Citi committed $20 million to a wider half-billion dollar credit agreement for Palantir in 2014 that, according to Palantir’s filings, has a maturity date of March 31, 2027.
Underwriting corporate bonds
Banks like Citi also play important roles as underwriters for corporate bonds.
One way for corporations to raise funds is to sell off units of debt to purchasers who, over time, will receive back the cost of the purchase of that debt plus interest payments from the corporation. But to sell their bonds, corporations need banks to underwrite them — to initially purchase them to then exchange them on the market.
For example, in 2024 Citi joined other banks in purchasing billions of dollars worth of corporate bonds from Boeing, the world’s seventh-biggest weapons company.
Like other weapons companies, Boeing is profiting from heightened war and militarization, recently reporting booming revenues of $22.2 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, a 14% increase from last year.
Asset management investments
In addition to lending to and underwriting corporate for major war profiteers, Citi is also a huge investor in these companies through its asset management wing.
For example, as of the most recent reporting date (May 11, 2026), Citi is massively invested in:
- Lockheed Martin, holding 256,537 shares worth approximately $155,048,546.
- RTX (formerly Raytheon), holding 1,973,699 shares worth approximately $380,726,468.
- Palantir, holding 4,930,147 shares worth approximately $721,181,903.
Citi, AI, and data centers
Citi is also accelerating its efforts to profit from the AI and data center boom. Business Insider reports that Citi has set up “a dedicated team to compete in the AI data center financing boom,” and “to handle different touchpoints in the data center financing pipeline.”
Business Insider also noted that recent data shows “that Citi ranked fifth for data center debt activity this year — up from sixth last year and eighth in 2024,” and that since March 2025, Citi has “handled more than $75 billion of data center construction financings,” supporting “roughly 6.1 gigawatts of IT capacity.”
In addition to financing what are deeply unpopular guzzlers of water and electricity, doling out tens of billions of dollars in data center loans also presents a potentially major financial risk for Citi. Many are worried that AI investments may have already reached the territory of a financial “bubble” that could burst if the hyped-up promise of AI doesn’t pan out.
Citi has also formed a strategic partnership with Google Cloud to advance AI within Citi’s own operations.
“We’re methodically deploying AI at scale across the firm to drive revenues and process improvements, enhance client experiences, and strengthen our defensive capabilities,” said Citi CEO Jane Fraser at the bank’s most recent earnings call.
Resistance to militarism and AI converges on Citi
Across the U.S. and across the world, movements against the data center construction boom have proliferated, uniting broad constituencies across typical political divides who have shared interests around issues like energy affordability, environmental justice, public health, and corporate accountability against billionaire AI profiteers.
Similarly, there’s widespread sentiment against permanent war and massive military spending to drive conflicts — from Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians to the war on Iran — that few people support, but which weapons’ companies profit enormously from.
These fights — along with the fight against expanding fossil fuel infrastructure that is driving climate chaos — converge on banks like Citi, who finance and prop up the corporate profiteers behind war and militarism, and data centers and AI.
Moreover, these seemingly separate actors — data centers, and arms companies — are actually merging into an inseparable bloc: an AI-powered war machine that combines tech with weapons to maximize destruction.
None of this could happen without banks like Citi, which is why campaigns that are taking on the megabank’s power and profiteering and are on the cutting edge of the broad struggle for peace and justice globally.