JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPMC) is a figurehead of the banking industry. As the largest bank in the US and with a major international presence, its very name conjures up images of Wall Street.

With origins dating as far back as 1799, the current iteration of JPMC was founded in 2000 through the merger of New York City banks JP Morgan & Co. and Chase Manhattan Company. Needless to say, the centuries have led to a vast sprawl of JPMC, and the same can be said about its IT Infrastructure.

Darrin Alves was appointed CIO of infrastructure platforms at JPMC in April 2023, after a lengthy career in similar infrastructure and technology operations roles at the likes of eBay, Skype, Walmart, and most recently Amazon.

He says JPMC has always approached technology head-on and with a voracious appetite, always seeking the next edge in its operations when it comes to digital infrastructure. This sees the company using a healthy mix of enterprise data centers and cloud computing technologies.

A cloudy future

The company’s cloud stance has been well publicized. In April 2024, CEO Jamie Dimon wrote in a letter to investors that the company was aiming to get 75 percent of its data, and 70 percent of its applications, into the cloud that year.

“We’ve actually exceeded that goal, as far as getting data into the public cloud,” Alves tells DCD, with a hint of pride. “We are very nuanced, though. It wasn’t just an arbitrary goal, we had specific use cases, it’s not just an initiative where we are trying to get everything into the cloud.”

Alves added that the company “strongly believes” in a multi-cloud and hybrid strategy. While he declined to comment on the cloud companies it works with, Dimon has previously stated that JPMC is a customer of the notorious Big Three - Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

The reason behind that multi-cloud strategy is relatively simple: resiliency.

“We take a hybrid, multi-cloud approach because we are very concerned about concentration risk,” Alves says. “If a cloud provider had an outage, the financial services industry cannot be impacted by that - it is critical infrastructure, and we don’t want to be beholden or at risk with any single vendor.”

JPMC turns to the cloud for a variety of reasons. Alves offers the example of generative AI - noting that cloud partnerships have enabled the bank to “experiment with capabilities that we do not yet have on-premises."

“We use the cloud where there are leading-edge capabilities, but also we will use it for data storage where we don’t want to tie up our data centers with that.”

On the data center side, JPMC has a pretty hefty estate comprising 32 data centers across the world.

Those data centers are a combination of JPMC-owned facilities, and colocation, though Alves notes they own a “large majority,” and almost all of their data centers in the US and Europe. “We are reducing and concentrating that down to 17 over the next few years,” he tells DCD, adding that this is a “soft goal” and doesn't have a fixed deadline.

JPMC declined to comment on if they would then sell those exited facilities.

“Among the 32 are state-of-the-art hyperscale facilities, and we keep a large portfolio mainly for regulatory reasons,” Alves explains. “We are in a large number of countries with active regulators that have sovereignty requirements and things of that nature, so we have to abide by the rules and regulations of those countries.”

Details about the data centers themselves are sparse, though Alves shares that the hyperscale facilities are modularly designed and built with high efficiency and low PUE ratings. “For the things that we don’t think we should host in the cloud, we want them to be in our most efficient data centers,” he says. JPMC doesn’t share an exact number for its PUEs, but Alves says that the data centers are only a few years old and built using “best practice.”

The on-premise debate

The world of enterprise data centers is shrinking, but on-premise servers remain common in many industries, particularly those that are highly regulated, such as financial services. For JPMC, this is a choice that makes sense, Alves says.

“We’re at a size and scale where we can do things pretty effectively as far as purchasing, and then we can also provide levels of security that you can’t guarantee in the public cloud or sometimes even a colocation,” he explains. “It’s about finding the right hosting model.”

When it comes to making that choice, JPMC follows a pipeline of thought. Decisions are first based on legality and compliance, followed by security standards enabling JPMC to “dictate who touches it [the data] or where it could be and that could apply to a cloud provider, or a municipality or country,” Alves says.

After that, the bank looks at customer availability and resiliency. “It’s only once we get past those three things that we look for the right architecture, and the last thing we do is optimize for cost,” Alves adds.

In 2024, JPMC spent $17 billion on technology - although this was not limited to infrastructure and encompassed all technology spend across the company. The figure represents an increase of around $1.5bn on the year prior, and from $12bn in 2021.

Normally that number isn’t broken down to look specifically at data centers, but in 2021, CEO Dimon shared that $2bn had gone to new data centers. At the time this move was questioned by analysts, given that the company was also looking to move a lot of applications to the cloud.

Regardless of the reception, JPMC has remained committed to a hybrid approach, and its overall spend in 2025 is looking likely to be more than $17bn.

During the 2024 Q4 earnings call in January 2025, CFO Jeremy Barnum said that the increase in tech spending was mostly “business-driven as we continue to invest in new products, features, and customer platforms, as well as modernization.”

Barnum noted, however, that the company said at its latest investment day that it had reached “peak modernization spend.”

“As Jamie [Dimon] says, we're always modernizing,” Barnum told investors. “So, the fact that we've gotten to a peak and then it might come down a little bit from here still means we're going to be constantly modernizing. But, at the margin, that means that inside the tech teams, there's a little bit of capacity that gets freed up to focus on features and new product development.”

He added that the company is also finding efficiency in its hardware utilization, and software development.

Mainframe moves

JPMC’s data centers are home to a variety of hardware, including the classic mainframe.

Alves says he cannot share specifics about the work the mainframes are doing - though it is in the region of $10 trillion payments daily - for security reasons. “What I will say is that a lot of the systems that were using the mainframe have been modernized and they aren’t using it in the same way they have been, but the most critical systems are still using it.” In early 2022, Dimon told analysts that the company’s credit card business was run on mainframes.

Beyond that, the company is investing in GPUs, and quantum computing research.

On the GPU front, JPMC’s upcoming data center modules are designed for liquid cooling which will enable them to increase density in their data halls and give the company direct access to these technologies. “We don’t want to have to fight with everybody for cloud space, so we have a portfolio that allows us to do bursts and offer our own service.”

The company does its own training, though this is “small-scale fine-tuning and training,” so JPMC doesn’t need to invest on the same massive scale that we are seeing the cloud companies doing. Interestingly, though, the cloud providers’ capex and investment in this area does have a knock-on effect.

Alves explains: “We focus more of our AI workloads on inference, and with that, we have to be very conscious of the supply chain, because the same things we use to build our facilities, they [the hyperscalers] are using. We keep a very close eye on lead times so we can continue to expand our facilities and adapt. If we need to make a decision two years earlier than we would have had to previously, we will.”

He continues: “There are different horizons. We look at the near future - so one to two years, then there's five years out, and a 10-year clip. What we’re seeing in lead times for some devices - chillers and generators, for example - is that lead times are in excess of two years, and then if you are building a facility, there is construction time too.

“We are constantly forecasting what we believe our demand will be. And more recently, that has included the use of AI and what that impact will be. And then, looking out in those five to 10-year clips to see if we need to start doing something now to match that supply chain.”

The company’s use of AI has long been public. JPMC launched its “LLM Suite,” a generative AI tool, in 2024.

“[LLM Suite] was a controlled environment where we could give them access to large language models to concern things for internal, non-public facing use cases,” he says. “We've evolved into using generative AI, and machine learning to do things without internal tooling.

“I use it in the infrastructure area. We have a large number of these cases across the company, but I alone have probably 20 or 30 where we're using it to augment anomaly detection and things like that, to help us run and optimize the infrastructure,” Alves says, noting that they are currently looking into ways they can use agentic workloads to integrate into more core parts of the business.

On the quantum computing side, JPMC is still at the R&D stage. The company is a “strategic partner” of Quantinuum, and took part in a $300m equity fundraise for the quantum company in early 2024. It has also been publishing research papers related to quantum computing since 2020.

Overall, for Alves, he says his role as CIO at JPMC has been wildly rewarding, and he particularly cites the people he works with as a part of that. “I think people underestimate the team. The leadership, across each business unit, is the number one business operator in that area. People don’t realize the level of success that even the leadership team one clip below Jamie [Dimon] has.

“They've been fun to work with, and on the technology side, as I mentioned, I'm working with technologies that I didn't get to work with before. The variety of technologies that we use, being part of financial services, the processes, and the regulatory requirements, are things that are new to me.

"That new muscle I've been developing has been quite interesting.”