What Is Palantir's Rio Tinto Partnership?

Not affiliated with Palantir Technologies Inc. This page is an independent explainer based on publicly available sources.

Rio Tinto, one of the world's largest mining and metals companies, has been one of Palantir's longest-running and most frequently cited commercial customers — a relationship that's expanded steadily since it began.

How the relationship started

Palantir and Rio Tinto signed a multi-year enterprise agreement for Palantir's Foundry platform in January 2021, building on smaller data-integration projects the two companies had already run together the prior year — including digitizing Rio Tinto's Borates business unit, connecting workers with data in underground mining operations, and supporting employee safety monitoring during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rio Tinto's then-CIO, Fay Cranmer, described the partnership as an important step in the company's digital transformation, aimed at enabling faster, forward-looking decision-making across its operations.

What the software actually does for Rio Tinto

According to Palantir's own announcement, Foundry integrates raw data from many disparate sources into a single representation of Rio Tinto's mining operations, giving both frontline and office-based workers access to a shared source of truth — combining operational and transactional data with the security and privacy controls appropriate for each user.

The 2024 renewal, and the shift toward AI

In November 2024, the two companies renewed and extended their enterprise agreement for an additional four years, this time specifically securing Rio Tinto's ongoing access to Palantir's AI Platform (AIP), not just Foundry. Palantir has noted that Rio Tinto's team spent several years building out its own Ontology within Foundry — the structured data layer we cover in more detail on our dedicated Ontology page — which the companies say now allows faster deployment of AI applications across areas like risk identification, asset management, and supply-chain fulfillment.

Why this partnership gets cited often

Rio Tinto is one of the more consistently referenced examples of Palantir's non-defense, non-financial commercial business — a heavy-industry customer using Foundry for operational rather than analytical purposes. It's frequently pointed to in coverage of Palantir's commercial growth story as evidence the company's technology generalizes beyond government and finance use cases into industrial settings.