Palantir, a software company that develops data analysis and surveillance tools used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Israeli Defense Forces, announced Tuesday it had moved its headquarters from Denver to Miami — and released new financial records revealing concerns about protestors last year.
An annual report released this week shows Palantir was worried about activist-led protests over the technology company’s contracts that “are or are perceived to be harmful” and “have resulted in public criticism.”
Denver-area activists organized numerous protests against Palantir at its Colorado headquarters over the past year, targeting the company for its collaboration with the ICE and the Israeli military.
Most recently, demonstrators protested at Palantir’s offices in Denver on Jan. 31, chanting “Palantir out of Denver” and “No AI for ICE,” the Denver Post reported.
Palantir received more than $1 billion in U.S. government contracts last year, primarily from the Department of Defense. Their second-largest U.S. government contracts are with ICE, including $30 million last April to develop software dubbed “ImmigrationOS” to track and target people for immigration enforcement.
Palantir didn’t respond to questions from the Miami Herald about what motivated the move to an Aventura office building. It’s also unclear how many employees Palantir plans to relocate to its new Miami-Dade County headquarters and whether it will maintain offices in Denver.
The company announced the move in a brief post on X Tuesday morning. The company’s new listed address on its federal filings is a suite in The Abbey shopping and dining complex owned by Aventura Mall next door.
Esplanade in Aventura is rebranded The Abbey at Aventura after Turnberry and Simon formed a joint venture to acquire the 219,000-square-foot open-air retail center adjacent to the Aventura Mall in December 2025. Hero Image
We have moved our headquarters to Miami, Florida.
— Palantir (@PalantirTech) February 17, 2026
Although Palantir’s announcement did not provide an explicit explanation for the company’s move, Palantir listed the protests among its “risk factors” in the company’s 2025 year-end filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission — made public the same day it announced the move to Miami.
The company told investors in the 2025 annual report that “activists have also engaged, and may continue to engage, in public protests at our properties and other locations.” The company also wrote that its response to the backlash “may divert resources and our management’s attention, increase certain operating and other expenses.”
Palantir had also mentioned public protests as a “risk factor” in its 2024 annual report, but it did not tie those actions to operating expense increases or potential litigation like the company did in this year’s report.
The company’s headquarters have long been a target for protests.
In 2020, the company moved its headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to Denver. A letter from Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp at the time expressed growing discontent with the culture of the “engineering elite” in Silicon Valley. He has also called Colorado “sane and pleasant place” that’s “very pragmatic.”
That move followed demonstrations against Palantir’s contracts with ICE at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters. Groups like #NoTechForICE organized protests at Palantir offices across the country in 2020 and held a “farewell party” at the company’s Palo Alto offices when the tech company departed for Denver.
Denver activists celebrated Palantir’s announcement as a win in an online platform on Reddit where organizers planned many of the Palantir protests. Miami activist Thomas Kennedy was swift to denounce Palantir’s planned move Tuesday, criticizing Miami Republican Maria Elvira Salazar for welcoming Palantir to Miami in a post on social media.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which sees Salazar’s seat as one of the most competitive races in Florida, also derided her praise for Palantir’s move.
“The truth is out — Salazar’s parading around and feigning support for migrant communities,” DCCC spokesperson Madison Andrus said in a statement. Salazar has previously spoken out against Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
But the company could be betting that opposition to its contracts with ICE and the IDF is not as strong in Florida as it had been in Colorado and California. For one, Florida has stronger laws on the books that can be used against protestors than Colorado does.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a controversial law in 2021 that expanded the definition of a riot and set higher criminal penalties for people involved in certain demonstrations that block traffic. The International Center for Non-For-Profit Law included that law as one of three Florida statutes it lists as restricting protests. It identified no such laws in Colorado.
Unlike Denver and Palo Alto, the city of Miami entered an agreement with ICE last summer authorizing police officers to carry out immigration enforcement. And although ICE operations have been taking place in Miami in recent months, the protests here have not been as large-scale as they’ve been in blue cities targeted by federal immigration enforcement action.
Kennedy, the local activist, said there are multiple, “compounding factors that serve to demobilize” organizing in South Florida.
That includes “the actual urban landscape of Miami where walking and public transportation is non-existent and places to gather are unfriendly to actual social gathering,” Kennedy said. “And then, of course, there’s a political context where mobilizing is intimidating — intimidating because of the anti-protest laws, intimidating because of the systematized deputizing of immigration enforcement.”
Palantir’s move also appears to be a part of a larger trend of tech and finance giants leaving more liberal states for more conservative ones like Florida. The billionaire co-founders of Google and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg recently purchased homes in South Florida, after a proposed billionaire wealth tax in California.
Peter Thiel, the co-founder and chairman of Palantir, announced late last year that he was moving his investment firm, Thiel Capital, to Miami.
Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder and CEO of the hedge Citadel, moved his company from Chicago to Miami in 2022, and he has since started an initiative with fellow South Florida billionaire Stephen Ross to encourage more business leaders to come to Florida.
John Boyd, a principal of The Boyd Company, Inc., a Boca Raton-based firm that offers site selection consulting services for businesses, said South Florida is becoming a more attractive destination as more billionaires and businesses choose to move here, drawn by the state’s pro-business policies.
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Miami Herald
Claire Heddles is the Miami Herald’s senior political correspondent. She previously covered national politics and Congress from Washington, D.C at NOTUS. She’s also worked as a public radio reporter covering local government and education in East Tennessee and Jacksonville, Florida.
Miami Herald
Catherine Odom covers real estate for the Miami Herald. She previously interned on the Herald’s government team and has worked as a journalist in Germany and Armenia. She is a graduate of Northwestern University.