Palantir comes to Piketon: what the Centrus deal really means for southern Ohio
The only U.S. uranium enrichment facility just partnered with the intelligence community's favorite surveillance contractor — and Peter Thiel's fingerprints are all over it
PIKETON, Ohio — Centrus Energy made headlines this week with a splashy announcement: a new partnership with Palantir Technologies that the company says has already identified nearly $300 million in cost savings toward its multi-billion-dollar uranium enrichment expansion at the Piketon facility in Pike County.
On the surface, it reads like a win. American uranium enrichment. AI-driven efficiency. Energy security. Jobs in southern Ohio.
Look closer, and a different picture starts to emerge.
What the press release doesn’t tell you
Centrus framed the deal in the language of patriotism and energy independence — and to be fair, the mission at Piketon is genuinely significant. The facility is the only place in the United States actively enriching uranium today, and the expansion is meant to reduce America’s near-total dependence on foreign state-owned enterprises that currently control almost the entire global supply of enrichment capacity.
But the partner Centrus chose to help execute that mission isn’t just a software company. Palantir Technologies was founded with CIA seed money, built its core technology in collaboration with U.S. intelligence analysts, and has spent two decades embedding itself so deeply into the federal surveillance apparatus that distinguishing where the government ends and Palantir begins has become genuinely difficult.
That’s not speculation. It’s the company’s own origin story.
Who is Palantir, really
Palantir was founded in 2003 with $2 million from In-Q-Tel — the CIA’s venture capital arm — and $30 million from Peter Thiel and his Founders Fund. Its flagship product, Palantir Gotham, was designed from the ground up to ingest massive quantities of data from financial transactions, social media, private communications, and intelligence feeds, and surface connections that would otherwise stay hidden.
Today, Palantir holds contracts with the Department of Defense, ICE, and intelligence agencies across the federal government. In 2024, the Pentagon awarded the company a $480 million, five-year contract to expand the Maven Smart System — an AI platform that processes battlefield data and identifies targets for military commanders.
This is the company now integrating its systems across Centrus’ classified and unclassified environments at Piketon.
The Thiel problem
Peter Thiel is not a passive investor. He is Palantir’s controlling stakeholder and, by extension, holds considerable indirect influence over every agency and institution that depends on its software.
He is also a man who wrote in 2009 that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. He bankrolled J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign to the tune of at least $10 million — the same J.D. Vance who now sits in the second-highest office in the country. He covertly funded the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker Media to punish a news organization that had written critically about him. He has poured money into Rumble, the far-right video platform. He backs Anduril Industries, the autonomous weapons contractor now building a $1 billion facility in Pickaway County with hundreds of millions in Ohio taxpayer subsidies.
Thiel doesn’t make moves for fun. Every investment, every political donation, every partnership has a strategic logic behind it. And now, through Palantir, he has a direct line into the only uranium enrichment facility on American soil — a facility that handles classified nuclear materials, operates under DOE oversight, and sits in the heart of southern Ohio.
What this means for Piketon
Pike County has lived in the shadow of the Piketon facility for decades. The site has a complicated history — contamination concerns, worker health claims, DOE oversight failures documented by federal inspectors. The community has long been caught between the economic promise of the facility and the legitimate questions about what goes on inside it.
Now that calculus gets more complicated.
The Centrus-Palantir partnership will, by the company’s own description, integrate Palantir’s tools across classified and unclassified environments at the plant. That means Palantir’s data infrastructure — architecture built for and continuously refined by the intelligence community — will be woven into the operational fabric of a nuclear facility.
Centrus says the goal is to optimize project controls, supply chain management, manufacturing execution, and regulatory compliance. Those are reasonable objectives for a complex industrial expansion.
But Palantir’s tools don’t just optimize. They surveil. They integrate disparate data streams. They surface patterns. And they report back to a company whose controlling shareholder has demonstrated, repeatedly, that he views information as power and has no particular commitment to democratic accountability.
The questions nobody is asking
Centrus and Palantir held their announcement at AIPCon 9, a showcase event for Palantir’s government and industry clients. It was polished and optimistic. The $300 million in identified savings was the headline.
Nobody asked who controls the data generated at Piketon once it flows through Palantir’s systems. Nobody asked what safeguards exist to ensure that intelligence-community-grade data tools operating inside a nuclear facility don’t create new vectors for surveillance or foreign intelligence exploitation. Nobody asked what Peter Thiel’s long-term interest in having his company embedded in America’s only uranium enrichment operation actually looks like.
Those are the questions southern Ohio deserves answers to.
The expansion at Piketon may well be in the national interest. Restoring domestic uranium enrichment capacity is a legitimate goal. But handing the data architecture of a classified nuclear facility to a company built by and for the intelligence community — a company whose controlling shareholder openly disdains democracy and has spent years quietly consolidating influence across government, media, and defense — is not a decision that should pass without scrutiny.
Especially not in Pike County. Especially not here.