Palantir has drawn scrutiny for supplying systems that public agencies use to integrate and analyze data about people’s lives, from health to security and economic administration.
In June, Reuters reported that Britain was reviewing its £330 million NHS contract over concerns about confidentiality, public trust, and dependence on a U.S. supplier, alongside reported improvements in waiting lists and hospital discharges. In May 2025, The New York Times reported that Palantir engineers were organizing IRS taxpayer data using Foundry. Last year, the Washington Post also documented Palantir’s expanding military and immigration enforcement work.
Yet Palantir’s everyday reach remains narrower than Microsoft’s, Google’s, or Meta’s. For decades, Microsoft and Google have served people worldwide, across languages, with tools for education, communication, and office work. They have become part of the infrastructure of daily life.
Less clear is these companies’ intent to become integral to citizens’ institutional lives through government itself. For the past 120 days, I have followed Google’s footprint across several of Brazil’s 26 states. São Paulo, for instance, is roughly the size of Oregon. Its preliminary 2025 GDP, converted at the annual average exchange rate, would place it 15th among U.S. state economies, behind Virginia and Michigan.
I selected three states for comparison: São Paulo, Paraná, and Mato Grosso. Together, they had 61.6 million residents and generated approximately $90.5 billion in agricultural production value in 2024. This exceeded the reported output of Germany ($81.7 billion), Italy ($81.6 billion), and the Netherlands ($44.6 billion), approaching France’s $96.7 billion. Google provides infrastructure and information services for these state governments.
GOOGLE’S EXPANDING ROLE IN PARANÁ
At Paraná’s state government headquarters recently, José Padilha walked me through Google’s growing role in education, healthcare, agriculture, and public administration. As director of artificial intelligence at the state’s Secretariat of Innovation and Artificial Intelligence, he shared how he had brought the company into these areas.
Celepar, the state’s government technology company, serves as a distribution partner for Google’s infrastructure and services across departments and agencies. Although the contract may not make the broader intent explicit, the arrangement embeds Google throughout state operations.
Paraná’s AI-First strategy spans 52 departments and agencies, consolidating government data into a central repository of structured and semi-structured information. At the time of our conversation, he said the government provided 5,000 licenses for Google’s LLM chat application to its employees and deployed 1,316 autonomous applications powered by large language models, known as AI agents. Padilha plans to expand access to 36,000 employees—30% of the state workforce—and extend services to all 399 municipalities.
The strategy includes projects applying Google’s technology to specific public services, from emergency management and agriculture to healthcare, policing, and migrant integration.
A CLOSER LOOK AT PARANÁ’S PUBLIC SERVICE PROJECTS
These state projects use Google’s technology to support specific public services.
PRISMA, an emergency management platform, combines weather imagery, historical and geospatial data, contingency plans, and municipal records on land use, population, and property. It aims to connect past events with current weather conditions and identify resources for timely responses.
Paraná Mais Sustentável, a platform for agricultural and environmental services, involves Google directly in its core technology and data processing. It integrates land use planning and rural services, combining records from approximately 300,000 agricultural operations with state agency data. Functions include rural addressing, route mapping, agricultural and environmental certificates, and analysis of data on native vegetation loss from PRODES, Brazil’s official satellite deforestation monitoring system, operated by the National Institute for Space Research. It also supports environmental reserve policies and certifications that may affect access to international markets.
Project Capricorn, an AI initiative brought by Google through a European partnership, uses a PubMed-derived dataset prepared for machine learning to support cancer case analysis in public hospitals.
The Intelligent Virtual Police Station, a state police service using Google’s technology, helps residents file police reports through a conversational interface, structuring facts for police review. Its current role focuses on operational support. G-Migra, a state migration management platform also using Google’s technology, organizes data for the Justice and Citizenship Department to plan and monitor migrant reception and integration policies.
Padilha is enthusiastic about the results, reporting substantial benefits for residents. My own observations also point to improvements and strong public approval. According to Padilha, Google executives and affiliated suppliers work directly with government teams, and five other Brazilian states are considering adoption. Google maintains a sales team in Brazil to support this expansion.
BIG TECH: STRENGTHEN OR DISPLACE THE STATE?
At Google’s invitation, I attended an event in São Paulo last September, where Padilha presented Paraná’s projects to attendees. There, I saw how Google organizes its commercial efforts to serve governments as customers, with dedicated sales executives and formal industry divisions covering education, the public sector, telecommunications, healthcare, and energy and natural resources.
Google may already be embedded in public infrastructure across dozens of countries beyond the familiar markets of the developed world, attracting less attention along the way. A preliminary search identified contracts, procurement initiatives, and partnerships in Chile, Malaysia, Kuwait, Israel, and Rwanda, as well as an agreement with the African Union Commission. These relationships suggest an increasingly pervasive institutional presence.
Data privacy remains an essential concern. Alongside that discussion, however, lies an institutional question: As technology companies become integral to public services, how might they change the state’s capacity, authority, and legitimacy?
We may be observing the formation of a horizontal position that spans national borders, bringing together new combinations of data and populations. In this sense, “informational countries” could emerge across the fixed geographic boundaries of existing states. But concluding that this development has harmed, or will harm, those populations would require evidence we do not yet have. The full impact on residents remains difficult to measure.
Information now moves faster than the administrative snapshots through which the modern state, shaped in the twentieth century, understands its population and economy. Businesses operate at that speed, potentially changing how we classify economic activities in the years ahead.
From a system dynamics perspective, faster and richer information can improve the feedback through which institutions adjust their decisions. Whether this produces better outcomes depends on how that information is interpreted and acted upon. There is reason for optimism, but the result is not automatic.
Google’s expanding infrastructure also creates opportunities for developers around the world. Their ability to turn those opportunities into services that improve people’s lives will be an important measure of what these relationships ultimately deliver.
Rodrigo Magnago is director at RMagnago Critical Thinking.