Palantir and the NHS – 10 things you need to know
Palantir and the NHS – 10 things you need to know
https://theconversation.com/palantir-and-the-nhs-10-things-you-need-to-know-281165
Publish Date: 2026-04-24 10:25:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
Palantir, a US data analytics company backed in its early years by In-Q-Tel, now plays a central role in the NHS’s £330 million Federated Data Platform. Supporters say it could improve planning and efficiency, while critics have raised questions about governance, transparency and trust. Here’s what you need to know.
1. What is Palantir and what does it do?
Palantir is a large American technology company, specialising in storing large data collections and providing tools to manage the data, in particular artificial intelligence (AI) to ask questions of it. It provides decision-making platforms, such as Foundry, which government organisations and businesses use to uncover patterns, manage operations, and support planning and decision-making.
The company’s chairman, Peter Thiel, is known for his controversial views. At the Oxford Union in 2023, he said that the NHS makes people ill and should be privatised.
Peter Thiel thinks the NHS should be privatised.
Mark Reinstein/Shutterstock.com
2. Why is a private American company involved in managing NHS medical records?
That’s not how Palantir views it. It sees itself as providing a platform on which the NHS can store and analyse NHS medical records. And that wouldn’t be exceptional. A large amount of data from across society is stored on cloud platforms provided by American companies.
Some of the discussion is about whether Palantir is really less trustworthy than, say, Microsoft, Google or Amazon.
3. Who gave Palantir this contract, and was it put out to open tender?
The governments of Boris Johnson (2020) and Rishi Sunak (2023) awarded Palantir the contracts.
Palantir had been lobbying to get access to NHS data for a while when it offered to build a COVID data store for £1 in early 2020; there was no open competition under emergency COVID procurement rules. The data store combined patient-level data from many…
