Over the past year, major European banks and asset managers have dramatically increased their investments in Palantir, the controversial U.S. technology company. This is despite the firm’s links to serious human rights violations. The company provides services to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) and to the Israeli army in the Palestinian territories. In 2020, Amnesty International denounced the company for failing to comply with international standards, while the consulting firm MSCI gave it a score of two out of 10 for “civil liberties” and “human rights” in a recent benchmark report for institutional investors worldwide. Palantir’s founder and chairman, Peter Thiel, openly advocates anti-democratic and anti-EU positions.

Even so, more than 100 major European banks, asset managers, insurers and pension funds increased their combined stake in the company by more than 60% in the last year. This is according to data compiled by an international investigation coordinated by Follow The Money, a platform for independent journalism, and in which EL PAÍS participated.

The economic value of these stakes nearly quadrupled in a year, driven by the spectacular rise in Palantir’s share price throughout 2024. By the end of 2025, the total value of these investments reached $27 billion. However, this figure is a conservative estimate: it’s only drawn from the entities investigated that report their holdings to the SEC, the U.S. securities regulator.

The investment by some of the 127 companies analyzed is explained by their holdings in Palantir via funds that track stock market indices. These funds automatically purchase all the companies included in a particular stock index, and since Palantir is one of the largest publicly traded companies in the United States, the investors end up including it in their portfolios. None of the entities mention Palantir on their exclusion lists, which are intended to provide the names of banned entities that investors must avoid, due to their violations of international human rights standards.

Nearly all of the largest European investors in Palantir analyzed by the investigation claim to support the OECD guidelines. These require audits and due diligence when investing in companies accused of human rights abuses, especially in conflict zones or areas where artificial intelligence (AI) is used.

However, banks like Norges Bank, which manages Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, increased their investment in Palantir by 60% between 2024 and 2025, reaching almost 29 million shares worth $5.1 billion by the end of December 2025, making it the largest European investor in the company. French asset manager Amundi ranks second, with nearly $3 billion invested, followed by British insurer Legal & General ($2.5 billion). Among the major banks, London’s Barclays ($2.2 billion), Deutsche Bank ($2 billion), France’s BNP Paribas (over $1 billion), the Swiss National Bank ($1.1 billion) and the Dutch asset manager Cardano ($1 billion) stand out.

Among the European banks analyzed there are also two Spanish ones. Santander held shares worth $18 million at the end of 2025, or 16 times more than a year earlier. According to the bank, the investment is made through funds that are delegated to other asset managers, who make the investment decisions. BBVA, meanwhile, reached a total of $103 million invested in Palantir at the end of the same year, with its position increasing from 400,000 to 583,000 shares in 12 months. Sources within the bank emphasize that BBVA’s holdings are exclusively due to transactions made on behalf of clients and investment funds.

Why Palantir is problematic: From ICE to Gaza, via Germany

Palantir, now one of the main contractors for the U.S. government, began as a small company that was given a chance by Washington. Its founder and president, Peter Thiel, is one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley: he co-founded PayPal and was one of Facebook’s first investors. He’s also known for his opposition to democracy and for being Donald Trump’s main supporter in the tech sector.

The company has become known for its ability to analyze massive volumes of data and unstructured information in search of patterns, especially using tools designed for the armed forces and security services. Furthermore, unlike the rest of the industry, it has always shared some of its work in explanatory and educational videos on social media, as revealed by the tens of thousands of views it has accumulated on its YouTube channel.

Palantir isn’t the only company that analyzes data for the purpose of warfare. However, it’s the most emblematic when it comes to artificial intelligence and defense. Guillermo Pulido, a doctoral candidate in Strategic Studies, explains how AI has transformed the battlefield: “If you add up the sensors on drones, satellite cameras, and those on each soldier… there could be tens of thousands. Human capacity to analyze all that information would be unattainable: AI does this quite quickly. The kill chain — the process from finding a target to validating it — has gone from taking several days to just a few minutes.”

Palantir’s products have been used in the United States under four administrations, both Democratic and Republican. Its Maven Smart System (MSS) — which uses Claude, Anthropic’s AI — is considered critical by the Pentagon for gathering classified data from multiple sources and using it for target acquisition, strategic planning, as well as the guidance of drones and missiles. Several international media outlets have reported that Palantir’s technology was used in the recent missile strikes against Iranian targets.

U.S. security agencies have awarded multibillion-dollar contracts to the company. ICE has been using its software to locate migrant families since at least 2020, when Amnesty International denounced the agency for frequently overstepping its bounds in the use of this technology. 404 Media, an American digital media company, revealed that Palantir developed an application for ICE that maps the presence of migrants in specific neighborhoods, using personal files, photographs, and an estimate of the likelihood that they’re at home. Palantir maintains that its software helps “to better track the immigration lifecycle and serve [U.S.] national security while promoting efficiency, transparency and accountability. By improving data integration and data-dependent workflows, our software can help ICE more effectively and reliably perform its core functions.”

In 2024, the company signed a strategic alliance with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to support its military operations in Gaza. A Palantir spokesperson asserts that the company has not participated in the development of the AI systems used by the Israeli military to locate targets.

In Europe, several governments also rely on Palantir’s technology, though not without controversy. In Germany, the army’s cybersecurity division issued an official alert regarding the company’s use of sensitive defense data. Meanwhile, the use of the firm’s data-analysis software is prohibited at the federal level, although some state police forces still employ it. In Spain, the Ministry of Defense awarded Palantir a €16.5 million ($19 million) contract in 2022 without a public tender for the management of databases for the Armed Forces Intelligence Center. And, in the Netherlands, the army uses the firm’s software in secret military operations, as revealed by Follow The Money last year.

Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, has stated that he wants his company to make the United States the dominant global power. At the DealBook Summit in late-2025, hosted by The New York Times, he asserted that his country has “a superior culture” and justified ICE’s use of his firm’s software with these words: “We protect individuals in this country… and our Constitution derives that protection from a higher force: God.”

Francesca Bria is a professor at University College London and head of Eurostat’s digital sovereignty initiative. She describes how “Palantir isn’t a private company in the strict sense of the word. It’s an arm of the U.S. national security apparatus. When European governments acquire its tools, they aren’t just buying software: they’re surrendering sovereignty.”

The company dismisses these controversies as absurd. In statements made to the media outlets that participated in this investigation, a spokesperson argues that Palantir’s software has assisted European institutions in healthcare, defense and national security. “Palantir’s founding mission,” they claim, “is to support Western liberal democracies and their essential institutions.”

The investors who said “no” to Palantir

Palantir’s controversial collaborations with ICE and the Israeli military have earned it a score of two out of 10 for “civil liberties” and “human rights” in the MSCI report. This is a key reference document for institutional investors making responsible investment decisions.

In the Netherlands, after it was revealed that the country’s public pension fund for teachers had invested hundreds of millions of euros in Palantir, a group of investors launched a petition demanding that the fund divest from the firm. In a recent opinion piece, three professors from Utrecht University called the investment “painful.”

“The same professors who teach about privacy, autonomy, human rights and the humanitarian law of war,” the authors note, “are forced to participate in a pension fund that invests millions of euros in a company that’s inextricably linked to large-scale surveillance, the processing of military data, and human rights violations.”

In Norway, the war in Gaza did have consequences for the portfolios belonging to certain funds. The asset manager Storebrand sold a $24 million stake in Palantir in October of 2024, alleging that the company supplied products that allowed for the surveillance of residents in the Palestinian territories. KLP Pension, the Scandinavian country’s largest pension fund, excluded the U.S.-based Oshkosh Corporation and the German company ThyssenKrupp from its portfolio for selling weapons to Israel that are being used in Gaza. These, however, were isolated cases: the penalty for exposure to Israel has so far been minimal among major asset managers.

Translated by Avik Jain Chatlani.

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