It’s been five years since the budding tech giant Palantir Technologies uprooted the company’s headquarters from Silicon Valley to Denver, hoping to plant itself in the emerging tech hub and escape protests that had erupted both within the company and outside its doors.
Immigrant-rights advocacy groups had organized protests outside the company’s Palo Alto and New York offices, as well as at the home of its CEO, Alexander Karp, who criticized the California coast’s “monoculture.” A University of California, Berkeley conference on privacy law dropped Palantir as a sponsor. More than 200 employees sent a letter to Karp expressing their concern over the company’s contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which ostensibly focused on the agency’s investigative arm but which activists alleged facilitated raids and deportation efforts.
Amid the upheaval, company leaders shifted their eyes to the east, where state economic officials pitched Colorado as a fast-growing and highly educated purple state with a bubbling startup culture and pro-business policies.
“Colorado is a very sane and pleasant place,” Karp said in 2022, according to the Denver Business Journal. “It’s very likable, very pragmatic, and (there are) a lot of industrious, smart people that also want to live in Colorado. It’s great.”
In the years since settling downtown, Palantir has been catapulted into the ranks of the most valuable tech companies in the country. A leading data analysis firm, it is now decisively the most valuable company headquartered in Colorado, with a valuation of $437.2 billion as of Wednesday — worth more than the combined totals of the 57 other Colorado-based public companies tracked by The Denver Post.
When it moved to the state, it had never turned a profit. Last quarter, Palantir surpassed $1 billion in revenue. Karp lives in New Hampshire, but if he lived in Colorado, he would trail only Phil Anschutz as the state’s wealthiest resident.
The company’s valuation has drawn literal “wows” from Wall Street analysts. It’s also prompted some skepticism. Last week, the Economist ran a story headlined: “Palantir might be the most over-valued firm of all time.”
As the company’s profile has risen, the customers that played a part in that growth have drawn increasing national — and local — scrutiny to the company. Its expanding contracts with ICE, its work with the American and Israeli militaries, and national reporting about its ties to billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” under the new Trump administration have prompted national protests and near-weekly headlines.
Such concerns sparked an open letter from several ex-employees and criticism from a United Nations official, and they led Democratic senators and members of Congress to send Karp a recent letter demanding answers. WIRED recently referred to the company as “arguably one of the most notorious corporations in contemporary America.”
The company, which did not respond to interview requests from The Post last week, uses artificial intelligence to process and analyze vast amounts of data, offering everything from better efficiency for airlines to targeting assistance for the Ukrainian military.
Palantir has managed to marry two technological obsessions of the 21st century — mass data collection and the emergence of artificial intelligence — with ever-growing desires for efficiency and security.
“Palantir has been arguably among the — if not the most successful company, really, at applying these (artificial intelligence) technologies, at scale, to large-scale data,” said James Evans, a University of Chicago professor and director of the school’s Knowledge Lab. He also works on AI technology for Google.
“And this is why they’ve also come under scrutiny and controversy — because of what kind of data the government has in its possession.”
In an earnings call earlier this month, Karp, who has sought to frame the company as pro-democracy and antiauthoritarian, reiterated its ethos: “America is the leader of the free world, that the West is superior, that we have to fight for these values.”
What does Palantir do?
Palantir takes its name from the crystal ball-like “seeing stones” from “The Lord of the Rings” series, and the word itself translates, from author J.R.R. Tolkien’s own Elvish language, to “those that watch from afar.”
Founded as a sort of security-focused offshoot of billionaire Peter Thiel‘s PayPal, Palantir fills a demand created by companies’ and governments’ massive data collections amassed over the past 20-odd years, Evans said.
To government and commercial clients awash in information about customers, products and citizens, Palantir offers a solution. For a hefty fee, it can take huge, distinct datasets, blend them together and offer solutions to problems or “use cases” for what its customers can do with that data.
For an airplane manufacturer like Airbus, the company’s work meant merging 400 datasets to more quickly fix production mistakes, saving hundreds of millions of dollars.
For health officials rushing out vaccines during the pandemic, Palantir meant close monitoring of distribution.
Nebraska Medicine hired Palantir to make staffing recommendations and predict hospital bed availability.
The U.S. Department of Defense tapped the company to identify likely trouble spots for soldiers and to use AI to quickly identify targets, and the Ukrainian military has used it for targeting, too.
Palantir has taken credit for preventing terror attacks, and it has gained admirers in the military for its ability to steer U.S. troops clear of ambushes. It received initial funding from the Central Intelligence Agency, and a number of media outlets have linked the company — without confirmation — to the successful search for Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Using Palantir’s flagship program, law enforcement can centralize what they know about a person in one place and search for them using characteristics like their immigration status, their tattoos or their location, according to reports by WIRED and BuzzFeed.
That work is important, Evans said: As tech capabilities expand, the government should have access to AI software of its own. It’s impossible, otherwise, to monitor for certain financial collusion and crimes, he said.
The company’s government work has spanned presidential administrations, and Karp, the CEO, has previously criticized now-President Donald Trump. But according to the New York Times, the company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Trump took office, including additional money from established contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.
The Times also reported that the company was hired to “compile data on Americans” by merging information from different federal agencies in one location.
The company said in a blog post that the Times’ reporting about its government contracts was replete with “falsehoods and misleading statements” and that it began pursuing some of its new contracts under the Biden administration. It said it was not building a “master database project” and to do so would be “fundamentally at odds with Palantir’s values and our commitment to work in support of liberal democracies.”
Though Evans noted that its ties to federal contracting are a core and longstanding part of its business, Palantir’s recent work has drawn more scrutiny. Indeed, Trump thanked the company at a July AI summit.
“We buy a lot of things from Palantir,” he said.
Protests target company
Controversy has followed Palantir’s work. Five years after its ICE collaboration brought protests to its doors, Palantir has expanded its work with the agency, agreeing to build “ImmigrationOS” to track the movement of immigrants in the country.
According to CNN, the company was tasked with helping Trump’s DOGE initiative to build a “massive repository of data” that, among other things, would help identify people with civil immigration violations. Initially a project of Musk’s, DOGE moved through several government agencies in the winter and fall in an effort to reduce spending and limit government initiatives like foreign aid.
The company’s work with the Trump administration prompted a group of former Palantir employees in the spring to write an open letter criticizing the company.
Palantir also has drawn scrutiny for its ties with Israel, to which it agreed to provide new battlefield technology in early 2024. Last month, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories included Palantir on a list of companies that “profit freely” from Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip and occupation of the West Bank.
The company has said it’s proud of its work with Israel, according to the Guardian. It held a board meeting in Israel’s capital in early 2024, and the company’s work in Gaza and the West Bank prompted one of the largest Norwegian investors to dump its stock last year, Reuters reported.
Karp, the CEO, is a self-described progressive who’s donated primarily to Democrats, including to former Vice President Kamala Harris last year and to Colorado’s U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper and U.S. Rep. Jason Crow.
In a letter he wrote when the company went public, Karp framed Palantir as an active defender of the West. He said it wouldn’t work with customers company leaders considered “inconsistent with our mission to support Western liberal democracy and its strategic allies.” Though the company previously turned down a contract with Saudi Arabia over its human rights record, it announced that it would “deepen its ties” with the country in May.
In his letter, Karp reaffirmed that the company’s software “is used to target terrorists and to keep soldiers safe.”
“We have chosen sides,” he wrote, shortly after moving to Denver.
The company has devoted a growing pile of money to federal lobbying, according to the Wall Street Journal. But lawmakers of both parties have raised concerns: In mid-June, a group of Democratic lawmakers wrote to Karp, alarmed by the New York Times’ reporting about Palantir’s alleged work to create a “government-wide, searchable ‘mega-database’ “ of taxpayer records. Several Republicans expressed similar concerns to Semafor.
The company’s efforts have sparked criticism among former employees, too. Juan Sebastián Pinto moved to Denver in 2021, looking for a change from the work he did for advertising and architecture firms. Then he got a job offer from Palantir as a content strategist, to “help the sales and technical teams express these complex ideas and messaging,” he said.
He worked with the company’s automotive teams — meaning work with car companies — and on defense.
Pinto said he was concerned about the “automated warfare” that Palantir was working on, as well as the amount of data car companies were gathering about their clients. He left and was one of the former employees who signed the open letter criticizing the company earlier this year.
He’s also part of a nascent protest effort to call attention to Palantir in Denver and — as Hatem Teirelbar of Denver Anti-War Action put it — to replicate what protesters in California achieved five years ago. Last month, a small group of protesters marched through downtown, accusing Karp and Thiel of being child-killers and handing out fliers urging people to “get Palantir out of Denver.”
They ended at the company’s headquarters, which is in the Tabor Center on 17th Street. The building had already been closed and its courtyard cordoned off.
Teirelbar said the goal was to force the company’s landlord to stop leasing to Palantir. Anecdotally, he said, more people seem to know about the company now than at the start of the year or in years past.
“I can tell you name recognition is much higher,” he said. “We’ve gone from telling people who Palantir is and where they are, to just saying ‘Palantir’ — (and that) just gets their interest.”
A growing workforce
Pinto linked the company’s presence in the state to deeper questions about Colorado’s identity and economic focus.
“We have to recognize what kind of legacy we leave behind as a state as we’re developing our identity,” Pinto said. “And things are happening right now that will affect the rest of the world — not only emerging AI weapons and targeting technologies, but also the integration of these technologies with the federal government, which is exactly why Palantir is here.”
Since the company’s move to Denver, Palantir’s global, full-time workforce has jumped to 4,164 as of June, up from roughly 2,400 in 2020, according to federal security filings. In addition to Denver, the company has offices in political and cultural capitals across the world, including Paris, Tokyo, London and Washington, D.C.
It’s also become part of the state’s growing tech ecosystem, which includes offices for Google, Salesforce and Slack. In a June 2020 letter to Karp that urged a move to Denver, Gov. Jared Polis — whose wealth is also a product of the early tech boom — highlighted the state’s emergence as “one of the top science and technology hubs in the United States.”
The governor’s office declined an interview request this week. In a statement, spokesman Conor Cahill said the state is “always open to attracting more companies.”
“There are companies in our state that some people like and others don’t,” he said, “and that is their right.”
Denver Post staff writer Aldo Svaldi, the Associated Press and the New York Times contributed to this story.
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