The UK government has six months to decide whether to terminate a National Health Service contract with Palantir worth more than $400 million, and one English region is arguing the deal is not needed at all. Greater Manchester's integrated care board, which covers around 3 million people, has repeatedly declined to adopt Palantir's federated data platform, choosing instead to stick with a homegrown system it says is functionally ahead of the American vendor's product. The February 2027 break clause has become the focal point of a national fight over foreign technology dependence, NHS data governance, and whether Palantir's platform is delivering what it promised.
The contract was signed in 2023 to build a federated data platform, or FDP, that ingests and organizes health data across the NHS. Palantir and the NHS say the rollout, which began in early 2024, is cutting wait times, shortening hospital stays and improving operating-theatre utilization. NHS figures show 139 of roughly 200 trusts are now live with the technology and 35 of England's 36 integrated care boards are actively using it. The one holdout at the ICB level is Greater Manchester.
Greater Manchester runs the Analytics and Data Science Platform, or ADSP, an in-house system developed over close to a decade. At a May 2025 board meeting, and again in April this year, the ICB concluded that its local capability exceeds anything the FDP currently offers and that some of its functionalities are two to three years ahead. Matt Hennessey, chief data and analytics officer at NHS Greater Manchester, told Wired the ADSP is fed with primary care data that Palantir's platform does not receive, and its modular design lets the board swap components in and out as better tools emerge.
Key facts
- 01The UK government has six months to decide whether to terminate a $400M NHS contract with Palantir, with the break clause running out in February 2027.
- 02139 of roughly 200 NHS trusts are live with Palantir's federated data platform, and 35 of England's 36 integrated care boards use the system.
- 03Greater Manchester ICB, covering 3 million people, has repeatedly refused to adopt the FDP, sticking with its in-house Analytics and Data Science Platform.
- 04A May 2025 board meeting concluded Greater Manchester's ADSP is two to three years ahead of Palantir's platform on some functionality.
- 05The current Palantir contract runs to 2031 if the February 2027 break clause is not triggered.
The stakes go beyond one region. In June, a bipartisan group of UK politicians published a report describing the country's reliance on Palantir as an unacceptable point of weakness and urged the government to activate the break clause. A separate parliamentary committee reached similar conclusions in July, drawing on testimony from Hennessey. Committee chair Layla Moran wrote that Palantir is evidently not the only show in town.
Palantir and other FDP advocates dispute the framing. Tom Bartlett, an independent IT consultant who previously oversaw the national FDP rollout as deputy director of data engineering at NHS England, argues the comparison between the two platforms is not like-for-like. The FDP is designed to move tools and workflows between hospitals and integrated care boards on a shared technical foundation, he says, while the ADSP is scoped to regional analytics.
Stephen Childs, head of health care partnerships at Palantir UK, said thousands of doctors, nurses and other NHS staff use the FDP and many have gone on record with its benefits. A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said it is clear that thousands more patients are benefitting from the FDP every month. Palantir also disputes the characterization that Greater Manchester trusts are only nominally using its technology; Andy Haywood, chief digital and data officer at Health Innovation Manchester, said trusts in the region are logged as users on the spreadsheet but are not putting all their data into the system.
The political backdrop is doing real work here. Peter Thiel, a Palantir cofounder, said in 2023 that the UK should rip the whole NHS from the ground and start over. Chief executive Alex Karp's recent book, adapted into a Palantir manifesto, was described by one British MP as the ramblings of a supervillain. Palantir's expanding role in US immigration enforcement and battlefield software has drawn protests, petitions and a reported rebellion among NHS workers. Other European governments are also reassessing their dependence on US-made technology.
Jessica Morley, a health data researcher at Yale University's Digital Ethics Center, told Wired the NHS is a values-based organization and Palantir is essentially antithetical to those values. Greater Manchester ICB acknowledged in April that it had not begun a scheduled review of its FDP decision because public concerns had heightened rather than diminished. The MPs who recommended termination said they are not ideologically motivated but flagged what they called a clear mismatch with UK values.
Bartlett warns that the alternative to Palantir is not another vendor but a return to fragmented systems. He argues an anti-Palantir campaign is interfering with an honest assessment of the FDP's performance, and that terminating the contract in February would strand trusts that have already migrated off paper and spreadsheets. Hennessey says Greater Manchester has only ever claimed the ADSP is superior in a care-board setting, not across every NHS use case, which leaves room for the FDP to keep running elsewhere even if Manchester never joins.
The Palantir decision is one of the highest-stakes AI-infrastructure procurement calls any Western government will make this year. If the UK triggers the break clause, it establishes that a G7 health system can walk away from a US vendor mid-contract on sovereignty and values grounds, which changes the risk model for every European buyer weighing Palantir, Microsoft or a US-headquartered AI platform in a regulated sector. If it does not, the FDP entrenches itself as the default data layer for the NHS through 2031, and Greater Manchester becomes the exception that proves how hard it is to build a credible domestic alternative once a US incumbent is embedded.
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