Madrid calls the US data analytics firm a national security risk; NATO has put it in charge of alliance infrastructure and European asset managers keep adding the stock.
Spain has moved to block Palantir, the US data-analytics firm that builds software for defense, intelligence, and law-enforcement agencies, from new contracts with critical state bodies and public enterprises, citing national-security concerns. The decision, reported by El Confidencial on July 1, is grounded in evaluations by Spain's National Intelligence Center (CNI) and the Ministry of Defense.
NATO has spent recent years building out its data infrastructure around Palantir's platforms, putting the company at the operational core of alliance-wide intelligence and command-and-control work, according to Xataka's reporting on the government's reasoning. Madrid is now telling voters that the same vendor poses an unacceptable risk to Spanish state systems, even as Spain remains inside the alliance.
Palantir has been a fixture in Spanish government IT since 2017. The exact value of those contracts has not been independently verified by the mainstream outlets reporting on the veto; one cited procurement figure places law-enforcement and border-control work at roughly €10M. The new block targets future contracts with critical state bodies and public enterprises rather than dismantling existing deployments, LBC reported.
Sumar and Junts, both partners in Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's government, have publicly demanded that the government explain what Defense data has been shared with Palantir under existing arrangements, per Moncloa.com. A separate Moncloa.com piece frames the veto as a sovereignty statement: Spain inside NATO, but unwilling to hand its intelligence stack to a single US vendor.
More than 100 European asset managers and banks added to their Palantir positions in 2026, according to an El País English review of fund filings from April. The inflow predates the Spanish veto and has continued since.
One NATO ally's intelligence service has concluded Palantir is too risky for its critical systems. NATO headquarters has concluded the same vendor is essential to alliance infrastructure. And the institutional investors funding Palantir's growth sit in countries that have not yet drawn the same line Madrid is drawing. Either Spain is wrong about its own threat model, or the alliance and its largest capital pools are accepting a risk one of their own members will not.
No Palantir statement on the Spanish decision has surfaced in the reporting so far.