AI software company Palantir Technologies has partnered with edge infrastructure firm Armada to enable enterprises and governments to run and adapt open-weight models on compute, data, and physical infrastructure they own and control outright.
The collaboration, announced Thursday, aims to deliver sovereign AI on infrastructure manufactured in the United States and allied nations, with Armada becoming Palantir's inaugural certified modular data center partner.
The partnership extends the Palantir Sovereign AI Operating System Reference Architecture - jointly developed with Nvidia - to host compute infrastructure customers physically own. It combines Palantir's Sovereign AI Operating System - built on AIP, Ontology, Foundry, and Apollo - with Armada's infrastructure layer, including modular data centers, the Armada Platform to keep deployments under the customer's control, and the Sovereign AI Grid that connects deployments into a distributed system, the firms said in a statement.
Armada said its platform can operate without relying on an external cloud, including its own, and can run fully air-gapped where required.
"Palantir makes the software governments and enterprises trust with their most consequential decisions. Armada brings the infrastructure layer beneath it," Armada co-founder and CEO Dan Wright said. "Together we make sovereign AI faster to deploy, more sovereign, and more resilient - on-grid, off-grid, or fully air-gapped, in months instead of years."
Demand for sovereign AI on the rise
Demand for sovereign AI is on the rise, according to the firms, as organizations increasingly look to reduce their dependence on hosted models outside their control. Palantir customers also want AI capacity that can come online in months, using sites where power is already available, rather than potentially waiting years for new construction, the firms said.
"Sovereignty is not something you rent. It is owning the weights, the data, and the hardware those models run on - and knowing where that hardware was built," Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp said. "Our ontology gives institutions control over their data, their models, and the inputs they use to fine-tune models. Armada gives them control over the infrastructure those models operate from."
Last month, Karp said frontier AI labs may need to be nationalized because of the potential liabilities of the technology's "unlimited risks."