Palantir Technologies declared, “We are an n of 1” in the artificial intelligence software market on Monday, as the data analytics group reported yet another set of record quarterly results, sending its shares surging nearly 8% in late trading.
Investors cheered a powerful combination of faster growth, fatter margins, and a revenue outlook “crushing consensus expectations,” prompting a sharp rebound in a stock that had stumbled to start the year.
In his trademark outspoken style, CEO Alex Karp crowed on the following earnings call about “one of the truly iconic performances in the history of corporate performance or technology.” He argued that Palantir’s results would be “stellar, unusual, and sublime for a company that was in a much earlier stage of its development,” but this company is over 20 years old: “you just cannot expect a company like ours to perform at anything like this level.”
‘Incredible’ quarter tops forecasts
The Denver-based company reported fourth-quarter revenue of about $1.41 billion, topping analyst expectations and marking another record period for the company famously named after a magical object from Lord of the Rings.
Adjusted earnings per share came in at 25 cents, two cents above consensus, while net income climbed to about $609 million, helping deliver one of Palantir’s strongest profitability performances to date.
Management highlighted a “rule of 40” score—the sum of revenue growth and operating margin—at an “incredible” level of 127%. Karp attributed this to Palantir being the only company “choosing to exclusively focus on scaling the operational leverage made possible by the rapid advancements of AI models, a trend that we first called ‘commodity cognition’ well before others started repeating it.”
Palantir’s AI platform remained the main growth engine, particularly in the U.S. commercial market, where revenue and customer counts have been climbing at a breakneck pace. The company’s “boot camp” go-to-market model—short, intensive workshops where Palantir teams build live applications on customer data in days—has compressed sales cycles from months to weeks in some cases, with several organizations signing seven-figure deals shortly after attending.
Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andrusko wrote several days ago about the “Palantirization of everything” and how its “universal playbook” was much envied in Silicon Valley, yet difficult to replicate. “The Palantir pitch—parachute a small team into a messy environment, wire together homegrown, siloed systems, and ship a customized working platform in months—is compelling,” he wrote, but Palantir is a “category of one,” similar to how many companies pitched themselves as platforms in the 2010s, but very few actually were.
Government backbone, commercial breakout
While Wall Street’s focus has increasingly turned to Palantir’s enterprise roster, the company’s government business remains a cornerstone, supplying software to the U.S. Army, other Pentagon branches, and allied militaries. Government revenue continued to grow in the latest period, even as management acknowledged persistent macro headwinds in Europe and lumpiness tied to large contracts.
Looking ahead to 2026, Palantir forecast full-year revenue between $7.18 billion and $7.2 billion, implying growth of around 60% and handily beating consensus expectations. For the current quarter, the company guided to about $1.53 billion to $1.54 billion in sales, again above analyst estimates and signaling little slowdown in enterprise AI spending despite broader market volatility.
Commenting that forward guidance is “incredibly important for a company like Palantir,” which has such a lofty price-to-earnings ratio, Direxion Head of Capital Markets Jake Behan said the very confident 2026 outlook “just raised the bar.”
Traders needed proof of commercial AI at scale more than blowout earnings, he added, and Palantir’s 115%+ growth guidance delivered exactly that. “What’s clear right now is that the market isn’t rewarding AI hype, it’s rewarding production,” Behan said, pointing to 130% U.S. commercial revenue growth as evidence that Palantir is actually deploying AI at scale. It’s well positioned as a company both showing AI in real workflows and generating real revenue, with a “broader monetization test happening across the market right now,” he explained.
Karp said Palantir’s unusually strong performance is actually a problem for society, in the sense that other tech companies and countries outside of the U.S. and China have to ask themselves how they can compete: “Can we produce companies that are producing what we produce in a quarter in a year? And one of the things we’ve got to figure out in the West is how do we do this?” He said it’s putting “enormous political pressure on our institutions” because political leaders struggle with how to provide value “when there’s a disproportionate have and have not.”
According to Karp, at Palantir “the haves are the workers and the people that know how to actually use these products. And even the ground truth of this is so far away from what people intuitively believe. It’s actually not the capitalist against the workers. It’s the capitalist and the workers. But that’s very confounding to political leaders.”
[This article has been updated with analyst reaction and comments from Palantir’s earnings call.]
