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Palantir, an American data analysis and artificial intelligence company, has risen to prominence in Silicon Valley with its openly "America-first" ethos, a philosophy that some find controversial but that aligns with the direction of the tech industry under President Trump. The company's clients range from banks and hospitals to the US government and the Israeli military.
"We want and need this country to be the strongest, most important country in the world," Alex Karp, Palantir's CEO, recently declared at a client conference in Palo Alto, California.
In armed conflicts -- most notably in Ukraine -- Palantir's tools help evaluate potential targets in real-time, using multiple sources, including biometric data and intercepted phone calls.
"I'm super proud of... what we do to protect our soldiers... (using our AI) to kill our enemies and scare them, because they know they will be killed,".
Washington has been filling Palantir's coffers.
In the first quarter, the company received $373 million from the US government -- a 45 percent jump from the previous year -- and it's not all military spending.
This spring, federal immigration authorities (ICE) awarded the company a $30 million contract to develop a new platform for tracking deportations and visa overstays. The company then secured an investment of nearly $800 million from the US military, adding to the $480 million contract signed in May 2024 for its AI platform supporting the Pentagon's "Project Maven" target identification program. This marked Palantir's first billion-dollar contract, elevating it alongside government contracting stalwarts like Microsoft and Amazon's AWS.
However, financial results "are not and will never be the ultimate measure of the value, broadly defined, of our business," Karp wrote in his letter to shareholders in early May, where he tossed in quotes from Saint Augustine, the Bible and Richard Nixon.
Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel -- Silicon Valley's preeminent conservative -- Karp, and others with CIA backing.
Several members of the Trump administration's "DOGE" cost-cutting commission, originally headed by Elon Musk, came from the company.
