Billionaire Trump supporter in the eye of the Iranian storm
Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies’ software is used by the International Atomic Energy Agency for verifying Iran’s compliance and wide-ranging data analytics
Vienna — Silicon Valley billionaire — and US President Donald Trump supporter — Peter Thiel has emerged as an unlikely player in the international debate over Iran’s nuclear deal with six world powers. Thiel’s big-data engine, Palantir Technologies, is at the heart of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) system for verifying Iran’s compliance with the landmark 2015 agreement, according to officials familiar with the programme. The accord lifted years of punishing sanctions on the Islamic Republic in exchange for curbs on its ability to develop nuclear weapons. Scrapping the accord, as Trump is threatening to do as early as Tuesday, would not only anger the other signatories — China, Russia, Germany, France and Britain — it would also hamstring the IAEA’s increasingly sophisticated ability to track the use of uranium in Iran and around the world, according to Ernest Moniz, who helped negotiate the deal as US secretary of energy. "We have a completely unique and unparallele...
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