BREAKING: Palantir Admits Crucial Role in Ukraine/Russia Crisis

For the past month, individuals in the Palantir community have been speculating if Palantir was working with governments to aid and mitigate the problems caused by the Ukraine/Russia crisis.

Either_square was one of the first twitter accounts to find a Palantir Foundry .gov like that connected back to a Lithuania refugee crisis initiative. I broke this story that showed how the UK was using Palantir for their Ukrainian refugee crisis. We both ended up being right.

Shyam Sanker, COO of Palantir, recently went on Bloomberg to discuss Palantir's new satellites launched into space. He was asked about Palantir's role in the Ukraine crisis below:

"We have really mobilized our entire company against the invasion in Ukraine and the consequences of that I think in many ways we believe this situation was foreseeable and you know at the time of our listening we talked quite publicly about how we would not work with the Russian government and actually with Russian companies given the overall context there but now our software is being used to power refugee operations from Romania Poland Lithuania across all of Europe."

Here, Shyam is expicitly stating that Palantir's software has been used to actually power the refugee operations across many parts of Europe, further proving the argument many shareholders thought to be true: Palantir's software is crucial during bad times for governments to handle the massive amounts of data they need to make a change.

He continues,

"I've talked before about how supply chain is really a software problem and our software here is helping just like we do with the world food program it's helping match all of the goods that are coming in the beds that are available everything that's coming from the hands of the donors to the hands of the refugees and those who need it and doing that as efficiently and effectively as possible given the incredible scale millions and millions of refugees that need help in this moment similarly we're helping commercial companies with their supply chains there are a lot of automotive parts that are made in Ukraine we've helped BMW ensure the continuity of their Munich facilities and production plans by dynamically changing their production plans to respond to the changing supply chain shocks that are occurring and of course most obviously we have been deeply involved in helping with the military response not just in the us but across European nations who are on a fundamentally different footing from a defense and security posture since the invasion"

What This Means for Palantir

Two major things happened when the crisis unfolded: millions of people were displaced from their homes and millions of businesses lost control of their operations over night.

Alex Karp warned about how Palantir's software was one of very few softwares that exist in the world to be able to integrate the vast amounts of data necessary in order to mitigate the pain of bad times and make sense of the pain in order to eventually lead to good times.

These comments by Shyam prove that governments did call on Palantir in order to help them with their own initiatives to deal with Ukrianan refugees. One of the biggest problems in regards to data is keeping track of all the new entrants into the border and matching them with potnetial sponsors that can actually house them. All of this requires interpretation of data at scale.

Additionally, Shyam mentioned how they are working with companies that have completely shocked supply chains, including companies like BMW to ensure their production plans stay on track and that they had the ability to keep certain facilities in Europe open during the crisis.

Will this translate into growth for the business? This is yet to be seen. The news coming from Shyam today was amazing - it showed that in one of the worst moments in human history, Palantir's technology was up for the challenge to help solve the problems.

Palantir's goal is not to wait for the next crisis in order to prove their value. Management's entire argument is that crises are inventible, and the companies and governments that have technology integrated within their organization can be prepared for them before they happen. And if they don't happen, those organizations are still at a significantly stronger competitive advantage given the overall integration of their data.

Q1 Earnings call will likely be in May 2022 - more of a business story will be translated on that call from all of this. For now, it seems incredibly reasonable to assume that Palantir is playing a major role in actually becoming the most important software company in the world by helping to solve humanity's most important and crucial problems.