Europe Is Quietly Breaking Up With One of America's Most Powerful Spy-Tech Companies

Jun 5
8 min read

Somewhere in a government building in The Hague this week, a Dutch defence official stood up in parliament and said something that would have been almost unthinkable five years ago. The Netherlands needs to find a "fully fledged alternative" to Palantir - and it needs to happen within two years.

It was a quiet announcement in the context of a parliamentary session. No protests outside. No breaking news chyrons. But it landed as part of something much bigger that has been building across Europe for months - a slow, serious, and increasingly urgent reckoning with a company that now sits at the very centre of how Western governments collect, analyse, and act on data.

The question being asked in capitals from Amsterdam to London to Berlin right now is not abstract. It is deeply practical. And it is this: can you build a democracy's defence and security infrastructure on software owned by a company whose chairman openly supported the politician currently threatening your trade, whose tools are being used to deport migrants in America, and whose contract with Israel's military covers what the IDF itself describes as "war-related missions" in Gaza?

For a growing number of European governments, the answer is becoming: probably not.

What Palantir Actually Is - And Why It Matters

Before getting to the breakup, it helps to understand what Palantir actually does - because the word "data analytics" does not quite capture it.

Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and others, with early backing from the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel. Its two core products - Gotham and Foundry - are platforms designed to take enormous quantities of data from disparate sources and make them searchable, connectable, and actionable. Feed in immigration files, tax records, surveillance footage, financial transactions, military intelligence - Palantir's system finds the patterns, surfaces the connections, and tells you who to look at next.

For governments fighting terrorism in the early 2000s, that capability was extraordinarily appealing. France signed up after the 2015 Paris attacks. Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, the UK - all became Palantir customers. The British NHS signed a £330 million contract in 2023 for the company to manage the NHS Federated Data Platform, connecting fragmented hospital databases across England.

The company is now publicly listed, profitable since 2024, and by any measure a significant piece of the infrastructure of modern Western governance. Which is precisely why what's happening this week matters.

The Netherlands Says: Two More Years, Then We're Out

The Dutch State Secretary for Defence, Derk Boswijk, told the House of Representatives this week that a "fully fledged alternative" to Palantir must be available within two years.

Boswijk said the Netherlands has been using Palantir since 2010 on a "very limited, compartmentalised, and small scale." The context for his statement was a question from Dutch politician Michelle Jagtenberg, who argued the company has what she called a "racist and anti-democratic ideology" and asked the government to terminate its relationship entirely.

It follows a motion approved in 2025 to make the Dutch government more independent of Palantir and to find European-led solutions.

The Netherlands is not alone. It is just the latest.

Country by Country - The Growing Exodus

The picture across Europe, when you map it out, is striking.

Switzerland rejected Palantir bids at least nine times due to security concerns. Denmark is also seeking local alternatives.

Germany's domestic intelligence agency recently awarded the French company ChapsVision a contract to analyse large amounts of data - choosing it over Palantir, despite the US company's aggressive lobbying efforts. As of April 2026, the German national army has cut ties with Palantir entirely.

A recent report from the UK parliament described Palantir's programmes as giving the national government an "unacceptable point of weakness." The British Medical Association has called for a "complete break" from Palantir in the NHS. Multiple court cases have sought to overturn the company's NHS contract. Parliament held a full Commons debate in February 2026 examining Ministry of Defence contracts with Palantir, with MPs questioning a £240.6 million direct award.

France, for its part, is caught in an uncomfortable contradiction. Its domestic intelligence service, the DGSI, renewed a multi-year contract with Palantir in late 2025 - extending a relationship that dates back to the aftermath of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. The French government, loudly vocal about digital sovereignty and European tech independence, is simultaneously one of Palantir's biggest European customers. The irony is not lost on critics.

The Three Reasons Europe Is Walking Away

When you strip away the politics and look at what European governments are actually saying, three concerns come up again and again.

The first is data sovereignty.

A February 2026 law firm white paper noted that companies with US connections may be required, under the US CLOUD Act, to disclose data relating to European and UK customers to the US government - regardless of what contracts say. The contractual safeguards between European governments and Palantir cannot override US federal law. That means sensitive military intelligence, NHS patient data, and police surveillance records held on Palantir's systems are potentially accessible to American authorities. For governments trying to establish strategic autonomy from Washington - particularly as Trump's second term has strained transatlantic relations - that is not a theoretical risk. It is a structural vulnerability.

The second is ethics - specifically, what Palantir is being used for in America.

Palantir holds a $30 million contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) involving services including Self-Deportation Tracking and near real-time visibility into migrants' movements and profiling for deportation. The Intercept described the company as providing "the engine for Donald Trump's deportation machine." In 2025, 13 former Palantir employees published an open letter alleging the company's early ethical code of conduct had been violated and was being rapidly dismantled.

For European governments defending themselves to domestic audiences on data protection and human rights grounds, being partners with the company powering mass deportations in America has become a difficult position to hold.

Palantir also signed a deal with Israel's Defence Forces in 2024 for "war-related missions" to support military operations in Gaza. European campaigns have explicitly linked that contract to their calls for governments to exit Palantir agreements.

The third is ideology.

In April 2026, Palantir published a 22-point manifesto drawn from CEO Alex Karp's book "The Technological Republic" - pinned to the company's social media feed for its 32 million followers. For researchers and critics who study the company, the manifesto - framing technology as a geopolitical weapon and Palantir's work as a "civilisational" project - confirmed what they had long suspected: that Palantir is not merely a software company offering a technical solution, but an ideological project with a specific worldview about how power should be organised.

Peter Thiel, Palantir's chairman and largest shareholder, is an outspoken Trump supporter and one of the most influential figures in the network that brought the current administration to power. That is not a neutral fact for European governments navigating increasingly fraught relations with Washington.

The One-Pound Trick

If you want to understand how Palantir embedded itself so deeply in European governments in the first place, one observation - made repeatedly by critics - explains a great deal.

As one analyst put it: "They come and offer this amazing product for one pound. That one-pound contract became a one million pound contract when it got renewed."

Palantir's strategy in public sector markets - particularly in health and defence - has historically been to offer initial contracts at heavily subsidised rates, sometimes effectively for free, during crisis periods when governments need data tools quickly. The pandemic was a particularly effective entry point. During COVID-19, Greece and the Netherlands used Palantir's Foundry platform to analyse the spread of the virus and manage public health data.

Once the infrastructure is built on Palantir's platform, the switching costs become enormous. Data is structured around Palantir's architecture. Staff are trained on Palantir's interfaces. Institutional knowledge is embedded in Palantir's system. When renewal time comes, the government that signed a nominal one-pound contract is now paying tens of millions - because the alternative is tearing out the nervous system of an entire agency and rebuilding it from scratch.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a well-understood and openly discussed sales strategy. But it is the reason why Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark - all of which are now moving to exit Palantir contracts - are doing so on two-year timelines rather than overnight.

What European Alternatives Actually Exist

This is where the conversation gets harder, because the honest answer is: not enough.

Germany's decision to award ChapsVision - a French company - the contract that Palantir lost is significant but narrow. ChapsVision is not a direct Palantir replacement at scale. The broader European sovereign cloud and data infrastructure project is still years from providing a like-for-like alternative to what Palantir offers.

France has legislated sovereign hosting requirements, banning all non-European videoconferencing from government use in January 2026 - Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, all replaced by the sovereign Visio platform. That is a meaningful step, but videoconferencing is comparatively simple to replace. A military intelligence platform that processes billions of data points across 15 different agencies is not.

The UK's National Health Service, having signed a £330 million contract and with fewer than a quarter of hospital trusts actively using the Federated Data Platform by end of 2024, is in a particularly complex position. Multiple NHS trusts have publicly questioned the platform. Leeds Teaching Hospitals noted it would "lose functionality rather than gain it." NHS Greater Manchester stated that no FDP products exceed its existing local capabilities. The BMA is calling for a complete break. The government has not said what comes next.

The Bigger Question This Week Is Raising

The Palantir debate is really a proxy for a much larger question that Europe has been circling around for the better part of a decade - and which the Trump second term has forced into urgent focus.

How much of a democracy's critical infrastructure can safely sit inside American technology companies? And what happens to that infrastructure when US foreign policy priorities shift, when the political figures behind those companies become openly hostile to European governance norms, or when the uses of those tools in America become something European publics find morally unacceptable?

For most of the 2010s, that question felt theoretical. The US and Europe shared broadly aligned values. Silicon Valley was a reliable partner. The idea that the software running British hospitals, Dutch military systems, and German police databases might one day be a strategic liability felt like overcaution.

It no longer feels theoretical. The Dutch parliament is asking for an exit plan. The German army has already left. The British parliament is debating contracts it was never properly consulted on. Switzerland rejected the company nine times while others were signing.

None of this happens in isolation from the broader reorientation of US politics. And all of it points toward the same conclusion - that Europe spent the last decade building its most sensitive digital infrastructure on a foundation it is now not sure it can trust.

Unwinding that is not easy. It is not quick. And it is not cheap.

But the fact that it is now a mainstream political conversation in multiple European capitals simultaneously - rather than a concern confined to privacy campaigners and parliamentary committees - suggests something has genuinely shifted.

The breakup, it seems, is real. The question is just how long it takes.

Key Facts

Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp and others, with early CIA backing.
Its core platforms - Gotham and Foundry - are used by militaries, police forces, health systems, and intelligence agencies in Europe and worldwide.
The Netherlands announced this week it wants a full Palantir alternative within two years.
Germany's national army cut ties with Palantir in April 2026.
Switzerland has rejected Palantir bids at least nine times.
Denmark is seeking local alternatives.
The UK parliament called Palantir an "unacceptable point of weakness" in a recent report.
Palantir holds a $30 million ICE contract described as powering Trump's deportation infrastructure.
Palantir signed a deal with the Israeli Defence Forces in 2024 for "war-related missions."
France renewed its DGSI spy contract with Palantir in late 2025 despite being one of the loudest advocates for digital sovereignty.
Palantir moved its headquarters from Denver to Miami in February 2026.

References and Sources

Written by Mppress