Palantir, a Denver-based data analytics firm, is warning European blue chips that they risk losing their edge by lagging US rivals in artificial intelligence (AI).
The company reported on November 2 that its US commercial revenue jumped 148% year on year to $984 million in the third quarter. That overtook its US government revenue of $953 million for the first time in its history, while growth outside the US has been far slower.
“It’s something that does keep me up at night, which is you’re just not seeing the same rate of AI adoption in Europe specifically compared to the US,” said Louis Mosley, executive vice president for the United Kingdom and Europe at Palantir.
“Blue chips on this side of the Atlantic are not yet adopting AI, and that worries me because we’re starting to see extraordinary results from those big American blue chips,” he said. “If their peer competitors on the other side of the Atlantic don’t start to catch up and enter that race, fast forward four or five years, there’s going to be a huge divergence and they’re no longer going to be competitive.”
He said the gap isn't driven by European worries over tech sovereignty, even though much of his time is spent explaining to customers how they can keep control of their technology stack, Palantir and the AI models they use.
“That bifurcation in Palantir’s revenue growth is about how fast the US is growing, rather than Europe stalling or stopping or falling. It’s the relative growth rate that’s important,” he said.
Mosley said Palantir’s revenue growth is in some ways the purest proxy in public markets for how quickly an economy adopts AI. He called the commercial crossover a huge milestone for a company that many still see as a government business, with the US government as its largest customer.
Palantir was founded in 2003 and built its business on data integration software for defense and intelligence agencies. It now sells platforms that let governments and companies combine their data and deploy AI models on top of it.
Beyond the frontier labs
Mosley spoke at Bloomberg Tech London, a conference Bloomberg organized in London on November 3. Tom Giles, senior executive editor for global technology at Bloomberg, interviewed him in a session on putting Europe’s AI potential to work.
Palantir faces growing competition in Europe from homegrown defense technology firms, including Helsing and start-ups founded by former Palantir executives, as well as from large language model providers that can teach customers to analyze their own data without relying on Palantir.
Mosley said he welcomes the competition, as AI’s value comes only when companies spread it through their operations.
He cited the prospectus Anthropic filed in October for its initial public offering. He said its main case study, in which insurer AIG uses Anthropic’s Claude model to automate underwriting and parts of claims processing, was carried out through Palantir.
He said US companies increasingly worry about handing their data, and access to the inner workings of their business, to Anthropic or OpenAI as they roll out the models.
“There’s a growing resistance in corporate America to being dependent on an emerging duopoly in the intelligence layer,” he said. “The model is learning the tacit knowledge, the process knowledge that makes these businesses what they are, and it’s incredibly expensive.”
He said the frontier has shifted to taking an open-weights model such as Nvidia’s and training it on a company’s own data, including the traces of its own decisions. This “out-of-distribution” data is something only that organization holds. On a specific task, the result outperforms the latest generic model from a frontier lab.
“Take the open weights, adjust, fine-tune, and you have a better model than what you can get from the frontier labs,” he said. “You’re getting better performance at vastly lower costs, and that’s the future.”
At that point, the cost is essentially compute. Mosley expects large blue chips, and possibly governments, to move toward task-specific AI, a shift Europe has not yet matched.
Sovereignty is also shaping defense deals. NATO itself bought Palantir’s Maven Smart System in March 2025.
“What we need is each of the member states to get to a point where their own domestic or sovereign capability is at least as good as that. It doesn’t have to be Palantir, but it needs to be as good as Palantir,” Mosley said.
Sweden and the Netherlands have become customers after the US and UK, and he said more countries are in the pipeline. Poland’s defense ministry signed a letter of intent with Palantir in October 2025.
“You could think of these as the sovereign versions of Palantir for each of these countries that are completely distinct from any other version of Palantir,” he said.
Each country owns and operates its version independently and configures it to its own needs, while still working seamlessly with allies in a war.
Waiting on the NHS
In the UK, Palantir’s most prominent deal is a £330 million National Health Service (NHS) contract to roll out its software to every hospital in England. The seven-year contract runs as three plus two plus two years, and its first three-year period is nearing its end.
In June, the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee called Palantir’s growing presence in the public sector “an unacceptable point of weakness” and urged the government to use a break clause in the contract.
“We don’t know what the government is going to decide. We’re waiting to hear. You can imagine what I hope they’re going to decide,” Mosley said.
He said the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) has given the program a green rating, which only about 27 of the 217 government programs it evaluates hold. He added that the software has helped 117,000 patients get operations that might not otherwise have happened.
Palantir’s UK business started in defense, where foreign suppliers must give the Ministry of Defence full operational control. He said its UK entity is subject to those controls, and NHS data in its software never leaves the UK.
“I don’t think the government should have any concerns about operational sovereignty over Palantir,” he said.
Mosley said Palantir was built from the start to defend the West, defined by values such as liberal democracy and the rule of law rather than by geography. It supports democratically elected leaders even when he personally disagrees with them.
“We might be controversial in Europe for supporting Israel, but in the US typically we’re controversial for supporting Ukraine,” he said.
Asked about Elon Musk restricting Starlink services in Ukraine, Mosley said each country’s leadership decides how and where it uses a supplier’s technology. He said Palantir’s support for Ukraine has been steadfast since the war began.
“It wouldn’t be right for unelected technology executives to be making those kinds of micro decisions about whether their technology can be used in this or that military operation,” he said. “Once you’re in that relationship with a customer, you do have to trust the customer.”
He also said Palantir was not responsible for a US strike that hit a school during the war with Iran and killed more than 120 children.
The US military uses Maven Smart System in that war, but Mosley said the software is separate from the data fed into it. As a British national without US security clearance, he said he does not know the details of the case.
“If there are errors or inaccuracies in the data that feed it, it is the classic garbage in, garbage out problem,” he said.
Mosley expects more European defense ministries to sign their own Palantir contracts, while the UK government has yet to decide whether to extend the NHS deal for another two years.