🤝 Palantir & Lumen: A $200M AI Partnership! 💻

Palantir said on Thursday it had struck a partnership with Lumen Technologies that will see the telecommunications company using the data management company’s AI software to build capabilities to support enterprise AI services.

The companies are calling the deal “a multi-year, multi-million-dollar strategic partnership,” but Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources, that Lumen is going to spend over $200 million on Palantir’s tech over the course of several years.

The agreement will see Lumen pairing Palantir’s Foundry and Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) with its own edge computing, broadband infrastructure, and other digital services.

The partnership comes as Lumen tries to transform itself from a traditional telecom provider into a more modern tech infrastructure play. The company in September said it was “collaborating” with Palantir to integrate the latter’s Foundry and AI software and services into its operations, finance, and technology functions, “to transform its network and services with speed.”

While Lumen would not confirm the deal value, its spokesperson Joe Goode told TechCrunch in an email that the company’s use of Palantir’s tech was a “material contributor” to achieving $350 million in cost reductions in 2025. He added that what the companies learned during that collaboration informed their decision to take their partnership to the enterprise market. Lumen has committed to reducing expenses by $1 billion by 2027, and it says it’s already ahead of plan.

“Palantir demonstrated that its Foundry and AIP platforms could unlock Lumen’s data faster and cheaper than traditional data-lake migrations, and together we’re pursuing solutions to help large enterprises do the same,” Goode said.

For Palantir, this is the latest in a long string of deals for which it has partnered up with companies and government organizations of all stripes to sell its AI products and services. Including the Lumen deal, Palantir has struck 19 partnerships this year alone, across aviation, healthcare, telecom, contract management, data management, defense, and more sectors.

“By bringing AI into real-world operations through a connected ecosystem, we’re empowering businesses to reinvent how they operate, compete, and grow,” Kate Johnson, CEO of Lumen Technologies, said in a statement.

Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment.