Original author: Jack, Beating
Introduction: This article was originally published on February 2, 2026. Less than a month after writing it, Palantir once again validated the unsettling logical loop with data: war is its best advertising. Yesterday, as the U.S.-Iran conflict escalated and global risk assets were hammered, PLTR surged 7% against the trend, closing at $145. Q4 revenue grew 70% year-over-year; full-year 2026 guidance stands at $7.2 billion (+61%), with U.S. commercial revenue growth at 115%—Wall Street analysts collectively raised their price targets, with UBS upgrading directly from Neutral to Buy. More notably, the DHS has just signed a $1 billion, five-year contract to procure an AI platform covering CBP and ICE. The ImmigrationOS mentioned in this article is now transitioning from contractual documents into an operational enforcement system.
When Palantir’s market capitalization reached $328 billion and its 200x P/E ratio severed all ties with the traditional defense industry, the closed-loop system of “hard tech + financial fuel + political revolving door” championed by Thiel and others is no longer just a theoretical exercise—it has become the underlying code driving the American state machinery. Even more intriguingly, in Citrini Research’s chilling “AI doomsday scenario” that shook Wall Street, Palantir was listed as the only model likely to survive—even OpenAI is copying its playbook.
In January 2026, Minnesota went out of control.
The Trump administration has announced the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalia, meaning tens of thousands of Somali refugees who have lived in the United States for many years must depart by March 17. Minneapolis, home to the largest Somali community in the U.S., has become the area most directly affected by this policy.
Subsequently, Operation Metro Surge unfolded as planned. Over 2,000 federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, dressed in tactical gear, flooded the city—surpassing the total number of officers in the Minneapolis Police Department. They drove black SUVs and conducted intensive raids and arrests in residential neighborhoods.
Disturbing videos quickly spread across social media. Agents smashed car windows with window breakers, dragged screaming drivers out by the throat, and pinned them onto cold ground. Among the most shocking was the death of 37-year-old American citizen Renee Good, a legal observer who was shot in the head at close range by a federal agent through the windshield while documenting the law enforcement action. Authorities claimed she attempted to run people over, but the video shows her vehicle was only turning slowly.
Behind this large-scale manhunt lies a name: Palantir.
Multiple investigative reports reveal that ICE is extensively using a tool called ELITE, developed by Palantir, in Minneapolis. This system aggregates vast amounts of data—including Medicaid records, tax filings, and utility bills—and uses algorithms to coldly mark individuals as targets on a map.
According to publicly available federal contract records, ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract modification on April 17, 2025, to develop a platform codenamed "ImmigrationOS." Publicly released contract justification documents explicitly state that the system was designed to support the president’s executive order accelerating deportation efforts. Many believe the platform is essentially the operating system tailored for the large-scale, surge-style operations set to begin in 2026.
Over the past several years, Palantir has been labeled a "data butcher" by public opinion. Due to its data support for the Israeli military in the Gaza war, combined with long-standing ethical controversies and over a decade of losses, Palantir has been an "unwelcome figure" in Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
But over the past year, everything has changed.
From "Data Butcher" to "AI Faith Stock"
In 2025, Palantir ignited Wall Street. After two decades of operating in the shadows amid controversy, the company completed its transformation from an "outsider contractor" to a "backbone of the U.S. stock market." Its official inclusion in the S&P 500 in September 2024 was just the beginning; the company subsequently moved its listing from the NYSE to Nasdaq, and its stock price surged 150% within a year, briefly surpassing a $400 billion market cap, rendering all traditional valuation models inadequate.
Behind this is a dramatic reversal in its financial data. After 19 consecutive years of losses, Palantir achieved GAAP profitability for the first time at the end of 2022 and entered a phase of hypergrowth in the second half of 2024. Entering 2025, its quarterly revenue surpassed the $1 billion mark for the first time, reaching $1.181 billion, with year-over-year growth accelerating from approximately 20.8% in early 2024 to 62.7% in the third quarter of 2025.
The core driver of growth comes from a surge in its commercial business. In the third quarter of 2025, Palantir's U.S. commercial revenue surged 121% year-over-year. This astonishing figure completely shattered the market's traditional perception of its "government dependence." On Reddit, retail investors have elevated it as a "faith stock in AI," praising Palantir for building the underlying digital operating system for modern civilization. In 2025, retail investors net-purchased nearly $8 billion in Palantir stock, making it the fifth-most-bought security by retail investors that year and pushing its price-to-sales ratio above 100x.
Yet beneath the glittering prosperity lies Palantir’s darkest history of being cast out by the entire Western financial system.
In September 2020, to retaliate against investment banks for suppressing its valuation, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and co-founder Peter Thiel chose the highly provocative direct listing model. They bypassed the traditional bank underwriting process and avoided paying massive underwriting fees to banks, signaling a full-scale challenge to the entire Wall Street system.
Palantir's "original sin" is rooted in its founding DNA: it was one of the first startups funded in 2005 by In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Although it initially received only $2 million in seed funding, this intelligence agency background deeply tied Palantir’s business to government and military entities, particularly through its close collaboration with ICE.
Since 2014, Palantir has developed the ICM Investigation Case Management System and the FALCON mobile application for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under a $41 million contract, enabling federal agents to track the geographic movements of targets in real time using cell tower data to identify and locate undocumented immigrants.
Long-term collaboration with ICE has classified Palantir as a company with “potential human rights violations” and “surveillance society risk” within ESG frameworks. Palantir has consistently ranked among the lowest scores across major ESG rating agencies. Ethos ESG previously awarded Palantir an F rating with a composite score of just 18.1 out of 100, placing it in the bottom 1% of the software industry. Palantir scored 0 on social dimensions such as “accountability mechanisms” and “LGBTQ+ equality.”
This directly led to Palantir being excluded by numerous ESG funds and banking institutions. In today’s financial system, ESG ratings are no longer a marginal ethical consideration but a core gatekeeper for banks assessing credit risk, allocating capital, and determining business access. For mainstream banks, supporting a company with one of the lowest ESG ratings not only entails regulatory compliance pressure but may also trigger collective protests from their own employees and shareholders.
In the context of ongoing social hostility, ESG standards have become the most effective financial restraint against Palantir.
JPMorgan Chase was Palantir’s first major corporate client, investing $120 million in 2009 to use its software to monitor internal fraud. However, as the project quickly gained a negative public perception as “employee surveillance,” JPMorgan Chase terminated its partnership with Palantir and swiftly distanced itself from the company in its financial operations. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley, Palantir’s long-term financial advisor, slashed its valuation from $20 billion down to $4.4 billion in 2018.
Palantir has also faced financing challenges in Western financial markets. Due to its extremely low ESG scores, Norway’s largest asset manager, Storebrand Asset Management, and the Norwegian public pension fund KLP have implemented strategies to divest from and refuse further investment in Palantir, while major European banks have begun imposing covert financial exclusion against Palantir.
To survive, Palantir had to turn to non-Western traditional financial powers such as Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah Nasional, for financial support. This left CEO Kapfer utterly disillusioned with Western traditional finance. He has repeatedly criticized “woke culture” and the hypocrisy of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, condemning them for reaping the benefits of democratic order while refusing to support the technologies that uphold it.
From its founding in 2003 through the end of 2022, Palantir never achieved GAAP profitability in any single year. The wheels of fate only truly began to turn in 2022, thanks to two "explosions" from different domains: one ignited by the war on the Eastern European plains, and the other by the revolution of large language models hidden within data centers.
The Russia-Ukraine war became Palantir’s best commercial. Due to its technology being extensively used on the Ukrainian battlefield for target identification, refugee resettlement, and battle damage assessment, Zelensky personally praised Palantir extensively on social media. European policymakers suddenly realized that in the face of a brutal survival crisis, ESG’s moral absolutism seemed powerless.
On the other hand, the large language model revolution sparked by ChatGPT provided the nuclear fuel for the launch of Palantir's AIP artificial intelligence platform. Palantir’s core team recognized that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for "rehabilitation" had arrived. In a 2023 interview, CEO Alex Karp openly admitted: “We’ve been waiting for this moment for twenty years.”
The AIP released in 2023 is the strategic core of Palantir’s response to the large language model wave. It connects an enterprise’s disorganized internal data with large models through categorization tags, providing a “logical exoskeleton.” Meanwhile, its highly aggressive Bootcamp sales model has reduced what used to be a one-year sales cycle to just a few weeks. In the first half of 2025 alone, Palantir hosted over 500 bootcamps, driving a 65% year-over-year increase in its commercial customers and pushing its adjusted operating profit margin to an impressive 51%.
In September 2024, Palantir was officially included in the S&P 500 Index, meaning that passive funds tracking the index—regardless of whether they include ESG screening—must now purchase its shares. Meanwhile, major Wall Street banks that previously criticized Palantir or held reservations about it have now become key partners or research supporters of AIP.
The victory in the public market allowed Palantir to escape the suffocating fate of being "debanked," but this brutal struggle revealed a profound institutional rift. Palantir’s breakthrough is a heroic exception; in Silicon Valley, countless startups deeply focused on hard technologies continue to struggle desperately in the "valley of death," choked by the constraints of ESG criteria and the traditional banking sector’s political correctness.
They need a completely new financial infrastructure—a force of capital that dares to ignore "wokeness" and deeply understands its own value.
Rising from Solitude: From the Palantir Gang to Financial New Sovereignty
In July 2020, just before Palantir’s planned direct listing, a name that had disappeared for a decade reappeared on the company’s board of directors: Alexander Moore.
Within Palantir’s internal epic, Moore is a totemic symbol—the company’s “Employee #1.” In 2005, while Peter Thiel was still fundraising for a meager $2 million investment from the CIA, Moore, holding the title of Director of Operations, built the initial framework of Palantir in a modest Silicon Valley office. In 2010, he departed just before Palantir’s groundbreaking debut on the Afghan battlefield, entering the venture capital world and ultimately becoming a partner at 8VC.
Moor's return in 2020 felt more like a convergence of power. Behind him, 8VC is led by Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and the most industrially ambitious member of the "PayPal Mafia." This return seems to send a strong signal: the group of young people who once reshaped the intelligence world with code are now coming back to reshape America's industrial foundation.
In the breakout year of 2025 on the public market, the "Palantir gang" reunited—Lonsdale, Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril, and their mentor Peter Thiel—launching an even bolder plan in the power vacuum between Washington and Silicon Valley: the creation of Lonely Mountain Bank. This is not a traditional commercial bank; its very existence is a public rebellion against the current financial order. Amid the regulatory winter following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Lonely Mountain Bank secured approval and endorsement from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in just four months—with an almost "privileged" speed.
Behind this "special handling" is a dramatic shift in the power dynamics between Washington and Silicon Valley. Faced with change, bureaucracy has had to make way for the Thiel network.
Lonsdale envisioned a grand ambition for Lone Mountain Bank: to become America’s “sōgō shōsha.” This concept was rooted in the practical lessons he learned after leaving Palantir to found 8VC. During his tenure at 8VC, Lonsdale focused intensely on hard tech sectors such as defense, government, and industrial infrastructure, incubating and investing in numerous hard tech companies including Anduril and Epirus. Yet this experience led him into a profound sense of “structural despair,” which he summarized as a misalignment in the “geometry of capital.”
In the traditional Silicon Valley venture capital context, software companies are lightweight and offer quick returns, whereas defense hard tech companies like Anduril require massive upfront capital investments, often burning through billions of dollars from founding to IPO. Hard tech startups must confront the "trinity" of execution pressures: simultaneously managing hardware manufacturing, software integration, and complex Washington-based government-industry relations. Even more brutal is the insurmountable "valley of death"—the U.S. Department of Defense’s budget cycle spans 2 to 3 years, and many startups die in the budgetary black hole before securing their first formal procurement contract due to cash flow exhaustion.
Gushan Bank has abandoned traditional financial lending thinking, extensively recruiting former Navy SEALs and senior SpaceX engineers from 8VC’s “Artists Colony” program to examine the underlying data of hard tech companies from unprecedented perspectives, granting it asset pricing capabilities that traditional banks cannot match. When Anduril presented test data for a hypersonic missile, JPMorgan Chase saw high-risk R&D expenses, while Gushan Bank saw defense contracts for the next five years.
This model directly resolves bottlenecks and credit gaps in the flow of financial capital to physical industries. Leveraging its strong foundation in hard technology and its unique government accounts receivable financing model, Gushan Bank can accurately assess the default risk of a pending contract and provide asset-backed loans accordingly. This means Anduril can secure working capital now by pledging future missile orders and its factory equipment as collateral, without needing to dilute equity for cash.
However, the most secretive core moat of Lone Mountain Bank lies in its deep identity as a "relationship-based bank." Over the past decade, Peter Thiel and the Palantir network have quietly penetrated the U.S. federal government and military. Today, this network has evolved from a behind-the-scenes list of advisors into the front-line center of decision-making, providing Lone Mountain Bank’s clients with a highway to government contracts.
At the Pentagon, Undersecretary of the Army Michael Obedal oversees the Army’s budget and procurement strategy; despite signing a recusal agreement, his prior role as a senior director at Anduril enabled him to advance "rapid procurement" reforms that directly benefit non-traditional defense contractors supported by Lone Mountain Bank Services. The newly established Army “201st Detachment” has directly commissioned Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s Chief Technology Officer, as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserve. Jacob Herberg, formerly a senior advisor to Palantir’s CEO and now Deputy Secretary of State for Economic Growth, leads the “Pax Silica” Silicon Valley peace initiative, which is forcibly reshaping global supply chains to remove geopolitical barriers for mineral and semiconductor companies invested in by Lone Mountain Bank.
In the future, customers of Gu Shan Bank will no longer face the black box of bureaucracy, but rather “one of their own” sitting across the decision-making table.
Under the protection of a vast power network, the internal structure of孤山银行 exhibits an extreme contrast of calm. To establish itself amid the ruins of financial regulation, 孤山银行 has adopted an ultra-conservative strategy known as the “Fortress Model,” maintaining a Tier 1 leverage ratio of no less than 12%—nearly double the standard of traditional commercial banks. The massive deposits it attracts are strictly prohibited from being used for high-risk lending and are instead forcibly locked in safes holding highly liquid assets such as U.S. Treasury bonds.
Meanwhile, Lone Mountain Bank also built an extremely aggressive payment engine. With the compliance endorsement of former DOJ star prosecutor Katie Haun and her crypto venture firm Haun Ventures, Lone Mountain Bank merged with the stablecoin company Atticus and positioned itself as the “most regulated stablecoin trading hub.” For defense technology companies operating globally, warfare does not adhere to bank business hours. By adopting stablecoins as the settlement layer, the bank can provide 24/7 fund clearing services on holidays, ensuring秒级 payments for supply chains at locations such as the Polish border or Pacific bases.
At this point, the puzzle of Lonsdale’s “American conglomerate” is finally complete. This zaibatsu structure, which played a central role in Japan’s postwar rise, is defined by the intimate fusion of financial and industrial capital. Today, the “Palantir clique” is playing an infinite game that far exceeds venture capital logic. In this game, finance has been restructured into “financial fuel” for hard technology, powering America’s long-stagnant heavy industry.
Yet, the geographic center of this transformation is no longer the Silicon Valley Bay Area, but points to a heavier and more real coordinate. There, the former “Rust Belt” is being reshaped by this new financial force into America’s “new defense industrial corridor.”
American power, Silicon Valley's dream of reindustrialization
If you drive through the southern suburbs of Columbus in the winter of 2026, you’ll witness a strikingly cyberpunk scene: beside Rickenbacker International Airport, a super-factory codenamed "Arsenal-1" breathes like a colossal beast.
This factory, with a planned construction area of 5 million square feet, is Anduril’s crown jewel and the largest single defense manufacturing project in Ohio’s history. Its exterior glows with cold, pulsing signals, as thousands of engineers and technicians produce autonomous jet aircraft called "Fury," all coordinated in real time by an operating system known as "Arsenal OS." There is no noise of traditional assembly lines—only the quiet, lethal efficiency of flowing data.
This land was once the heart of American industry, where Cleveland’s steel, Akron’s rubber, and Dayton’s aerospace components together forged the foundation of the “Arsenal of Democracy” during World War II. However, with the rise of globalization and deindustrialization, it became the infamous “Rust Belt,” its vast abandoned factories and opioid-ravaged towns standing as scars of America’s decline.
But around 2024, the tide turned dramatically. Silicon Valley’s core capital, including Peter Thiel and a16z, began shifting their focus en masse from software companies in the San Francisco Bay Area to hard tech in the American Midwest. This was a philosophical reckoning initiated by Peter Thiel against the development logic of Silicon Valley over the past two decades.
The origin of this liquidation can be traced back to Thiel’s deafening lament: “We wanted flying cars, but we got 140 characters.” In Thiel’s view, the so-called “tech boom” since the 1970s has been a massive lie. Silicon Valley’s elites have become obsessed with the illusory prosperity of the digital world, optimizing advertising algorithms and social media to hook people into endless screen-clicking, while the physical world has suffered a fifty-year stagnation.
Thiel believes that this escape from the physical world has not only led to the hollowing out of economic growth, but has also made Western civilization dangerously vulnerable in the face of geopolitical challenges. Therefore, he established within Founders Fund an eschatological investment creed: if technology cannot solve “hard problems” such as nuclear fusion, space transportation, and hypersonic defense, then all unicorn companies will ultimately be meaningless.
To realize the philosophical vision of returning to the atomic world, Silicon Valley elites have demonstrated unprecedented political assertiveness. A16Z has packaged this as the "American Dynamism" movement, centered on using Silicon Valley venture capital to rebuild rigid national infrastructure.
To this end, a16z broke with the traditional venture capital practice of avoiding direct political involvement by establishing a high-profile office in Washington, D.C., and assembling a lobbying team composed of former senior defense officials and seasoned lobbyists. According to public records, a16z’s federal lobbying expenditures in 2025 exceeded $1.8 million, surpassing the total spending of the entire National Venture Capital Association. Their core mission is singular: to help hard-tech companies like Anduril and Hadrian cross the “valley of death.”
Within the walls of the Arsenal-1 factory, this philosophical movement is being transformed into productive forces that challenge the traditional military-industrial complex.
Traditional defense giants like Lockheed Martin are accustomed to cost-plus contracts, where the government covers any delays or cost overruns in research and development—essentially a system that rewards inefficiency. In contrast, the Anduril model is a classic “Thiel-style” approach—using venture capital to self-develop products, rapidly iterate until they mature, and then sell them to the military.
Meanwhile, the "American Power" camp emphasizes absolute supply chain sovereignty, with SpaceX serving as the prime example. Unlike traditional defense contractors that outsource components through a global supply chain, Anduril has built its own solid rocket engine factory to ensure that U.S. missiles can still leave the warehouse even if global shipping is cut off during war. Here, the production line itself is part of the software ecosystem; through "Arsenal OS," the factory can seamlessly switch from producing reconnaissance drones to manufacturing loitering munitions within weeks, based on battlefield needs—a level of flexibility unimaginable for traditional rigid production lines.
This "reindustrialization" movement has a final political umbrella—Vice President J.D. Vance from Ohio. A former protégé of Peter Thiel, Vance is the perfect bridge between Silicon Valley capital and the Rust Belt workforce. After assuming the vice presidency, he became the highest-ranking advocate for "American Power" in the White House, vigorously promoting an enhanced version of the "Buy American" provisions and offering substantial tax credits to tech companies building factories in the Rust Belt.
The data appears to be validating the madness and success of this strategy. As of early 2026, Ohio’s manufacturing output has posted double-digit growth for four consecutive quarters, with over 15,000 new high-end manufacturing jobs created. Not only Anduril, but Intel’s wafer fab in Licking County and Helion Energy, a fusion startup backed by Lone Star Bank, have all taken root on this land.
After Silicon Valley elites aligned with Washington’s power, this is no longer just Thiel’s philosophical utopia—America’s “reindustrialization” seems to be transforming from an empty slogan into a reality woven from steel and code.
The Achilles' heel of Leviathan
When we shift our focus away from Ohio’s bustling arms factories and back to the global supply chain map, the Silicon Valley elite’s revival fervor will quickly be doused by cold realities. This American reindustrialization machine, attempting to reverse the gravity of history, is hurtling at full speed toward invisible reefs formed by physical limits and economic laws. This is the most fundamental logical deadlock between geopolitics and macroeconomics.
The most lethal vulnerability is the elemental curse buried deep underground. Although the Arsenal-1 factory can assemble drones around the clock, it does not control the critical raw materials that form the nerves and bones of these machines. This is a deeply ironic闭环. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), China controls approximately 90% of global rare earth refining capacity. The Mountain Pass mine in California is the only rare earth mining site in the United States, but the ore extracted there must still be shipped to China for processing due to the lack of domestic separation technology, and then repurchased at high prices. This means that the new factory in Ohio is essentially using materials from China to manufacture weapons intended to contain China.
Parallel to the supply chain crisis is the “kilowatt war” taking place on America’s own power grid. Silicon Valley elites promoting “American power” deliberately avoid an awkward physical reality: the high-energy AI data centers and new manufacturing industries they rely on are locked in a life-or-death struggle on the same increasingly aging grid.
The computing power required for Palantir to train its next-generation large models is growing exponentially, with the energy consumption of a single data center approaching that of a medium-sized city. According to Boston Consulting Group’s projections, by 2030, U.S. data centers alone will consume 7.5% of total electricity, and the resurgence of manufacturing will further squeeze the remaining capacity. Before the commercialization of nuclear fusion technology invested in by孤山银行, the U.S. faces a zero-sum game: as the digital brain and industrial body compete simultaneously for limited energy resources, this giant’s movements are destined to suffer fatal paralysis due to insufficient blood supply.
The deepest and most intractable knot lies in the genetic paradox of dollar hegemony. Historically, no country has ever been able to simultaneously serve as both the world’s largest industrial exporter and the global financial hegemon, because this requires two entirely opposing monetary policies. To revive manufacturing and dominate markets through exports of weapons and industrial goods, the U.S. needs a weak dollar to lower production costs. But to maintain Wall Street’s financial dominance and attract global capital inflows to sustain financial prosperity, it must uphold a strong dollar.
This is the modern version of the famous "Triffin Dilemma."
Musk and Thiel attempted to use administrative means to forcibly reverse this flow, transforming the dollar from a public good serving the global financial cycle into a national instrument serving domestic industry. This may require the United States to tolerate long-term inflation, or even force Wall Street to surrender profits through administrative intervention to subsidize Ohio’s assembly lines. This is a political gamble that strikes at the very foundation of the nation. Will Manhattan’s financial capitalists truly be willing to sacrifice their global financial dominance for the sake of workers in the Rust Belt?
From the icy dragnet in Minneapolis to the secret convergence in Washington’s power corridors, a group of former hackers who once reshaped the intelligence community with code are now attempting to rewrite the physical world using the same logic. They have wagered their money, reputations, and even America’s fate, striving to prove that the “Silicon Valley model” can save an empire from its twilight. The answer may not lie in those polished pitch decks, but in the next winter’s blizzard—whether that fragile supply chain can still turn.
Click to learn about the open positions at BlockBeats
Welcome to the official BlockBeats community:
Telegram subscription group: https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Twitter official account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia