US software company Palantir Technologies has signed an agreement with neocloud provider Nebius to leverage the latter's AI and cloud infrastructure, a move that underscores the growing demand for sovereign and controlled AI deployment among commercial enterprises.
Under the partnership, Nebius will serve as Palantir's preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner. The company will eventually bring its compute and inference endpoints within Palantir's "enterprise perimeter," giving eligible Palantir customers direct access to Nebius's cloud and inference infrastructure. This arrangement will also enable customers to deploy open models on Nebius infrastructure, a capability designed to offer greater flexibility and control over AI workloads.
The two companies will also collaborate to deploy new compute capacity tailored to Palantir customers, using modular data center deployments at sites that already have access to power. This approach is intended to accelerate the rollout of AI infrastructure while addressing one of the industry's most pressing constraints: energy availability.
Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir, said: "Nebius' compute infrastructure powers your ability to run your own AI models under conditions you control. Our ontology and their infrastructure will undergird the sovereignty our partners are demanding."
Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius, added: "Organizations need both the performance of large-scale AI infrastructure and control over their data and models. Together with Palantir, we are bringing this to commercial clients, enabling them to run their optimized open models on trusted infrastructure."
The agreement reflects a broader industry shift toward sovereign AI, where enterprises and governments seek to maintain ownership and governance over their data and algorithms while still benefiting from high-performance computing. For Palantir, which has long served defense, intelligence, and public-sector clients, extending sovereign AI capabilities to commercial customers marks a strategic expansion of its addressable market.
Palantir Technologies was launched in 2003 by Peter Thiel and builds software to help organizations create and run artificial intelligence across private and public networks. An early investor in the company was the CIA through its venture capital branch, In-Q-Tel. The company is known to serve police forces, immigration departments, and various militaries. Its work with the likes of ICE in the US and the Israel Defense Ministry has drawn criticism, as have its collaborations with police forces on surveillance programs.
Nebius is a neocloud with a presence in Europe and North America. The company was the European business under Russia's Yandex before being spun out in 2024. Last month, the company closed a senior notes offering totaling $5.75 billion. Nebius said it intends to use the net proceeds to finance the continuing growth of its business, including building out data centers, developing its AI cloud, expanding its data center footprint, procuring key components including GPUs, and for general corporate purposes.