Key points
- Palantir names Nebius preferred sovereign AI partner
- Nebius compute to run inside Palantir's platform
- No deal value, term or capacity disclosed
- Nebius up 10%, Palantir down 2%
Palantir (PLTR) named Nebius (NBIS) its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner on Tuesday, giving the cloud company a potential route to Palantir's commercial customers. Nebius shares rose about 10% following the announcement, while Palantir slipped about 2%.
After an integration period, eligible customers will be able to run AI models on Nebius infrastructure through Palantir's platform, according to the joint release. The companies disclosed no deal value, contract length, computing capacity, or customer names, and gave no date for completing the integration.
What do Palantir customers get?
The release says the deal opens a sovereign option to commercial organizations that have not had one before. Sovereign AI is the pitch that a company or government can run AI models on hardware and data it controls, rather than sending its data to a shared public service. Palantir sells the software layer of that. Nebius builds and runs the data centers and GPU clusters. After what the release calls an integration period, eligible Palantir customers "will be able to deploy open models on Nebius infrastructure and continually adapt them using their own data for their specific domain," while keeping control of the compute, the data and the resulting models.
Alex Karp, Palantir's co-founder and chief executive, put it to customers directly. "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," he said in the release. Arkady Volozh, Nebius's founder and chief executive, said the deal brings that to commercial clients.
The two companies also said they would work together to bring new computing capacity online faster for Palantir customers, "including through modular data-center deployments at sites where power is already available." That's the same constraint the whole industry is working around. Grid connections take years, so builders are chasing sites that already have them.
What the partnership means for each company
For Nebius, the deal is a named channel into Palantir's commercial customer base, on top of a summer in which the company reported second-quarter results that sent the stock up 27% in a day and then sold $4.5 billion of convertible notes to fund more capacity. Nvidia said in August that sovereign AI was already a $30 billion business for it, which we covered in a look at the neocloud stocks positioned for it.
For Palantir, the partnership expands its infrastructure offering, but the announcement gives investors no new revenue figure to put into forecasts. Palantir grew revenue 93% in its latest quarter and raised its full-year forecast.
As of 12:23 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, Nebius traded at $249.31, up 10.1% from Friday's close of $226.39, and Palantir at $170.85, down 2.0% from $174.33, according to Robinhood market data.
