Palantir in Europe: How a US Data Giant Conquered the Continent — and Where It's Hitting Walls

The Follow the Money investigation

An international coalition of 18 outlets led by Follow the Money (Netherlands) — including Der Standard (Austria), Netzpolitik.org (Germany), Republik (Switzerland), El País (Spain) and Haaretz (Israel) — mapped Palantir's footprint across Europe. The finding is stark: in 12 countries, Palantir holds national-level government contracts spanning health, police, intelligence and military. The combined value of those deals runs to at least €1.4 billion, and the real figure is higher because Sweden, the Netherlands and others refuse to disclose amounts.

The software's capability is not in dispute. What the investigation scrutinises is who ultimately controls decisions made with it — and what that means for democratic oversight, fundamental rights and the rule of law in EU member states.

What Palantir actually does

Palantir builds platforms that fuse enormous, heterogeneous datasets into a single searchable system, turning raw data into decisions. Depending on the product, that decision can be an administrative act or a target selected in real time for a strike. The Maven Smart System, originally built for the U.S. military, is now NATO's central command-and-control platform.

The political problem

Palantir's co-founder and CEO Alex Karp, with Peter Thiel, have publicly argued the U.S. should become "more lethal" and spoken openly against democracy — a position reported by the investigation and documented in their own writings. The company's technology has been used by Israel in Gaza, by the U.S. in Iran, and by ICE inside the United States to hunt migrants, according to the reporting. These uses raise questions that democratic societies are entitled to ask.

The NATO shortcut

One of the most significant findings is how Palantir reached Europe indirectly. On 25 March 2025, the NATO Communications and Information Agency finalized a contract for the Maven Smart System NATO (MSS NATO). The deal took just six months — one of the fastest in NATO history. It is installed at Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum and at SHAPE in Belgium.

A top NATO commander told POLITICO that "today there is no real competitor for Palantir." For countries in NATO or the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force, using Maven means adopting Palantir's stack automatically — even without a direct contract. France and Germany are among those affected.

The legal problem for EU governments

This is where the analysis turns from politics to law. Three concrete risks emerge:

• Article 22 GDPR and automated decision-making. When software flags individuals for police or intelligence action, that can constitute a decision "produced by automated means" with legal or similarly significant effects. GDPR Article 22 gives individuals the right not to be subject to such decisions without meaningful human oversight. If the system is a black box whose reasoning cannot be explained, that right may be undermined.
• The US Cloud Act data exposure. Data stored by a US company can remain reachable by US authorities regardless of where the servers physically sit. For governments handling classified or personal data, this creates a jurisdictional conflict with GDPR transfer rules and the EU's data-protection fundamentals.
• Democratic accountability and transparency. Fundamental-rights frameworks require that interferences with rights be clear, foreseeable and subject to effective remedy. A proprietary system operated by a foreign private company — with its own engineers embedded in government IT — makes both explainability and public scrutiny difficult.

The pushback

Switzerland: After seven years of lobbying, the Swiss army rejected Palantir five times. An internal 20-page evaluation found that data sovereignty could not be guaranteed, the software could not run on-premises, and sensitive data might be readable by the US government and intelligence services. The recommendation: pursue European alternatives.

Germany: The Bundeswehr said in April 2026 it would make "no contracts at all" with Palantir to protect defense-database access. Germany's domestic intelligence agency instead chose the French firm ChapsVision.

Denmark: The army was instructed to abandon advanced Maven negotiations and seek a European alternative.

France & Norway: Both recently declined to renew existing contracts.

The sovereignty question

"Governments bear responsibility to their citizens, not to American oligarchs," says Francesca Bria of UCL's Eurostack initiative. Palantir insists customers retain full control and that it never sells or uses customer data. But critics point to a pattern: the company sends its own engineers, sells an opaque "magic layer," and creates dependencies that are nearly impossible to unwind.

Why this matters for Europe

The debate exposes a deeper tension. NATO's own admiral acknowledges Europe lacks chips, cloud infrastructure and the time to build alternatives — but insists short-term sovereignty means controlling data, not full autonomy. As long as Palantir's software decides who gets targeted and how governments run, the question of ultimate control remains unresolved.

The Follow the Money investigation and its full findings are available at Follow the Money.