::: lead Six points decide the choice for a regulated organisation in Europe: who operates the platform, where the data goes, who owns the model of the business, how an action reaches your systems, under which law, and what it costs in time and money. Foundry’s answers below come from Palantir’s own documentation. Monarch’s come from how Galahad builds. :::
1. Who operates the platform
Foundry is deployed and managed by Apollo, Palantir’s continuous delivery system, across cloud, on-premises and air-gapped environments.[^1] That is what Apollo is for: the platform keeps moving without a project on your side, because Palantir’s control plane runs inside your perimeter and updates what runs there. You host it. Palantir operates it.
Monarch is installed by you, under your accounts, your keys and your jurisdiction. Galahad operates no hosting for your data. One deployment, one ontology, one organisation, never shared. That single fact settles most of what a security committee asks.
2. Where the data goes
Foundry works on data it holds. Sources are synced into Foundry datasets; virtual tables let Foundry query some external stores in place, and today those are BigQuery, Databricks, Snowflake and open table formats in cloud object storage.[^2] The operational database your business actually runs on is copied in.
Monarch goes to the data. It reads across the systems you already run, computes on what it reads, and nothing is migrated. There is no second copy of your business to secure, reconcile, refresh and, one day, delete.
3. Who owns the model of the business
The Foundry Ontology is Foundry’s operational layer: objects, links, properties and actions, held inside the platform.[^3] It is a Foundry artefact. Leave Foundry and it stays behind, because it was never something you held; it was something you configured in someone else’s system.
The ontology is the part of Monarch that matters, and it is yours: the model of your business, the entities, the rules and the words your operators use, held as something you own and can read, in a form you can put a question to. If you cannot interrogate it, you do not own it.[^4] This is the asset that compounds, the one that does not travel to a competitor, and the one that outlives the people who hold it today.
4. How an action reaches your systems
In Foundry, an action edits Foundry’s objects. To reach a system of record it is wired to a webhook, configured on the action: a writeback that runs before the object edit, or a side effect that runs after.[^5] The decision lives in Foundry; your system receives an HTTP call.
Monarch proposes and never executes alone. Every action waits for a named human, is shown before it happens and stays reversible after: a mistake is an uncommitted draft, thrown away in one click. Provenance, determinism, reversibility, imputation are the four conditions of a machine of consequence, and Monarch is built on them, not decorated with them.[^6]
5. Under which law
Palantir Technologies Inc. is a United States company.[^7] When Palantir hosts Foundry, your data is in the custody of a US provider, and US law reaches data in a US provider’s custody wherever the server stands.[^8] When you host Foundry, the data is yours, and Palantir’s control plane is still inside your perimeter (point 1). Legal geography defeats physical geography.[^9]
Galahad is a French company. Monarch runs inside your infrastructure, under your jurisdiction and the accreditation that covers it, and can run fully closed: no outside model, no outside network, against a model you host yourself. GDPR and the AI Act are met on those terms, and every control is one you verify from your own network rather than a promise you file.
6. Time and money
Palantir’s own account of how it sells has three phases: Acquire, where Palantir carries the cost of a pilot; Expand, where use cases are built out at a loss; Scale, where the account becomes profitable for Palantir.[^10] The work is done by forward-deployed engineers embedded in your organisation.[^11] Pricing is by contract. The horizon is quarters.
Monarch shows a working demonstration on your real data in hours and a scoped deployment in days, because there is no migration to wait for. Galahad bills on the value created, payable on production: not on seats, not on hours, not on tokens.[^12]
Where Foundry is bigger
Foundry is a decade older and broader: pipelines, application building, a model catalogue, US federal accreditations, thousands of engineers to deploy. For an organisation that wants a platform operated for it, and accepts holding its model and a copy of its data inside a US vendor’s system, that breadth is real.
For a European organisation that must own its model, keep its data where it lives, answer to its own law and act within days, the six points above are the decision. On each of them Monarch is the faster and the more reliable choice.
[^1]: Palantir, Palantir Apollo: powering SaaS where no SaaS has gone before, blog.palantir.com: Apollo deploys and manages Foundry across multi-cloud, on-premise, private networks and fully air-gapped systems. Source [^2]: Palantir Foundry documentation, Core concepts: Virtual tables. Source [^3]: Palantir, Foundry Ontology. Source [^4]: Machines of Consequence, thesis 17. Read it [^5]: Palantir Foundry documentation, Action types: Webhooks. Source [^6]: Machines of Consequence, thesis 11. Read it [^7]: Palantir Technologies Inc., Form 10-K, fiscal year 2025, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Source [^8]: Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, H.R. 4943, 115th Congress (2018): a provider must preserve or disclose records in its possession, custody or control regardless of whether they are located within or outside the United States. Source [^9]: Machines of Consequence, thesis 33. Read it [^10]: Palantir Technologies Inc., Form 10-K, Our business model: the Acquire, Expand and Scale phases. Source [^11]: Palantir, A day in the life of a Palantir forward deployed software engineer, blog.palantir.com. Source [^12]: Getting your money’s worth, Galahad Newsroom. Read it