WASHINGTON — The Space Force awarded data analytics company Palantir $110.3 million in contract extensions for the company’s cloud-based data services.
The Space Systems Command announced June 15 it has added one more year to Palantir’s existing contracts for data-as-a-service. Under a project called Warp Core, the Space Force since 2021 has used the company’s cloud platform and analytics services to aggregate large amounts of data from disparate sources.
The one-year contract extensions include:
- $58.4 million for automatic data ingestion across the Department of the Air Force, continually pushing personnel, equipment, planning, health and other readiness data sources into a common data foundation.
- $32.7 million for commercial software licenses in support of Space Command and Control (C2) and space situational awareness for users at the National Space Defense Center and the Combined Space Operations Center. This contract also enables the platform to ingest Special Access Program data.
- $19.2 million for data services in support of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command. This contract allows the commands’ operations centers to ingest data from across DoD and combatant commands for joint all-domain command and control.
Under these data-as-a-service contracts, the Space Force is transitioning legacy data stovepipes into the Warp Core data analytics platform.
Warp Core is based on the Palantir Data platform that integrates and manages data from disparate sources.
According to the Space Systems Command, Warp Core “provides a common data interface, and enables better data sharing, streamlining of manual reporting processes and decommissioning of legacy systems.”
Industry analyst Louie DiPalma, from the William Blair market research firm, estimated that, before these latest contract extensions, Palantir has been awarded more than $195 million in contracts for the Warp Core project since it started in 2021.
DiPalma noted that the new contract extensions for Palantir, although significant, are not guaranteed to continue indefinitely as the Space Force recently added new vendors to its data-as-a-service program.
According to DiPalma, “going forward, growing the long-term revenue for Palantir’s Space Force program is at risk because the Space Force in March added 17 other vendors to the $900 million IDIQ contract, and only extended Palantir for one year rather than a customary multi-year agreement.”