Palantir, the secretive data behemoth linked to the Trump administration, expands into Europe
The data analysis company, known in particular for running the deportation machine of the Trump administration, is expanding aggressively into Europe. Who are its clients?
Palantir was founded in 2004, in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Its founders wanted to help intelligence agencies organize the data they collected, so that they would identify threats before they could strike. It is widely rumored that its tools helped find Osama Bin Laden prior to his assassination in 2011 (another theory is that the US simply bribed Pakistani officials).
But Palantir is not good at making money. The company has never been profitable, in large part because it had to customize its products for each client, making economies of scale impossible. A new product launched in 2017, called Foundry, is supposed to solve this problem. Europe became the testing ground for this new commercial strategy, which relies largely on Foundry.
AlgorithmWatch asked close to forty German companies about their links to Palantir and browsed hundreds of open sources to map Palantir’s clients.
Palantir’s software is nothing special. Despite claims that it could turn “data landfills into gold mines,” it simply provides a visual interface that lets clients interact with their own data streams. It is built on top of existing technologies such as Apache Spark, a cluster-computing framework. An employee, who might not be privy to every product of the company, wrote in 2016 that Palantir did “no artificial intelligence”, “no machine learning” and “no magic”.
These relatively modest capabilities might explain why several clients, including American Express and Coca-Cola, dropped Palantir in the last few years. Giovanni Tummarello, co-founder of the Ireland-based Siren.io, a competitor, claimed in 2017 to have signed some of Palantir’s former clients, mostly due to lower prices.