After a pilot program at Electric Boat in Groton, tech giant Palantir has won a $448 million contract to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence across the U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding base.
According to Navy officials, during the pilot deployment of Palantir’s foundry and artificial intelligence platform at the Groton submarine yard, schedule planning was reduced from 160 manual hours to under 10 minutes.
Another pilot at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire cut material review times from weeks to under one hour.
The new initiative has been dubbed ShipOS, and will leverage Palantir’s software “to bring modern best practices to the complex, data-heavy environment of Navy shipbuilding,” according to a release from the Navy.
“For decades, Americans have watched billions of their tax dollars poured into a maritime industrial base plagued by bureaucracy, delays and chronic shortfalls,” said Secretary of the Navy John Phelan. “ShipOS is not just new software; it is a new way of doing business that puts Palantir’s cutting-edge tools in the hands of decision-makers at every level, giving them complete, accurate, real-time feedback across the supply chain.“
The initiative, managed by the Maritime Industrial Base Program in collaboration with Naval Sea Systems Command, will aggregate data from enterprise resource planning systems, legacy databases and operational sources to identify bottlenecks, streamline engineering workflows and support proactive risk mitigation.
The initial investment will focus on submarine industrial base shipbuilders, shipyards and critical suppliers, including Electric Boat.
The expansion beyond the submarine industrial base will be informed by the lessons learned in the initial rollout, with the Navy validating approaches and developing implementation strategies that can be adapted for surface ship programs.
