Crypto news digest: Palantir's Europe chief says region is late on AI
Palantir's Louis Mosley says Europe is repeating its internet-era mistake on AI, a theme that also shapes bitcoin miners pivoting power sites to AI computing.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Speaker | Louis Mosley, Palantir head of U.K. and Europe |
| Claim | Europe is “missing the boat” on AI as it did on the internet |
| Palantir customers | Around 1,000, per Mosley |
| Contested contracts | U.S. immigration enforcement, Israel Defense Forces, NHS |
| Published | Oct. 12, 2026 (CoinDesk) |
Palantir’s head of U.K. and Europe, Louis Mosley, said in a CoinDesk interview published Oct. 12 that Europe is making the same mistake with artificial intelligence that it made with the internet. The remarks belong in a crypto news digest because AI demand is now shaping the business of bitcoin miners, which are converting power sites into computing hubs, and because the political backlash he describes is familiar to the mining industry.
The case for urgency
Mosley said the U.S. “got the internet right” and built a large number of businesses on it, while Europe “missed the boat.” CoinDesk noted that the two regions were roughly comparable 20 years ago on GDP per capita, capital-market depth and the size of their biggest companies, and that the U.S. has since compounded growth far faster. The internet era, he said, produced almost no European champions, with ASML the rare exception.
European corporates, in his telling, take a wait-and-see attitude toward AI because it is new and could be risky. Mosley called Palantir “the purest proxy on public markets for the rate of AI adoption in an economy” and said that with about 1,000 customers against a much larger pool of complex organizations in allied countries, he still sees the company as early.
What Palantir sells
Palantir builds an ontology and governance layer that lets governments and companies deploy large language models and agents in sectors such as healthcare, industry and defense. It is model-agnostic, so customers can run models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, open-weight providers or Chinese developers and fine-tune them on their own data.
Political resistance
Opposition in the U.K. and Europe centers on Palantir’s defense and law-enforcement work, including surveillance software for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and targeting systems for the Israel Defense Forces. Campaigners have also objected on ethical grounds to its use in public services such as the National Health Service.
Mosley said the controversy is mostly about “Gaza and Trump” and argued it distracts from domestic priorities, asking whether politicians would tell a constituent to wait longer for a hip operation because of a supplier’s unrelated foreign contracts. He acknowledged AI will disrupt jobs but said it will also free nurses and police from paperwork. The biggest risk, he said, is a political failure to explain the technology’s benefits.
Link to crypto
The interview itself is not about digital assets, but it touches the same infrastructure story. Hostility toward energy-intensive technology is not new: bitcoin miners faced attacks over electricity use a decade ago, and many that have pivoted to AI high-performance computing now draw the same criticism over power consumption.
What to watch
European decisions on AI procurement in public services, and how energy-heavy data center projects are received locally, will test Mosley’s argument.
Prepared with AI assistance from public sources and reviewed under our editorial policy. Not investment advice.
