Palantir Technologies said Monday: “We are a No. 1” in the artificial intelligence software market, as the data analytics group reported another round of record quarterly resultssending its shares up nearly 8% at the end of the session.
Investors hailed a potent combination of faster growth, bigger margins and a revenue outlook that “crushed consensus expectations,” sparking a sharp rebound in a stock that had stumbled early in the year.
In his candid style, CEO Alex Karp sang the following call for results about “one of the truly iconic performances in the history of business or technology performance.” He argued that Palantir’s results would be “stellar, unusual and sublime for a company that was at a much earlier stage in its development,” but that company is more than 20 years old: “You just can’t expect a company like ours to perform at that level.” »
An “incredible” quarter tops forecasts
Denver-based Palantir reported fourth-quarter revenue of about $1.41 billion, beating analysts’ expectations and marking another record period for the company known for its magic object name. 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” 127%. Karp attributed this to the fact that Palantir is the only company “choosing to focus exclusively on increasing operational leverage enabled by rapid advances in AI models, a trend we first called ‘market cognition’ long before others began parroting it.”
Palantir’s AI platform remained the primary growth driver, particularly in the US commercial market, where revenue and customer numbers grew at a breakneck pace.training camp“The go-to-market model – short, intensive workshops in which Palantir teams build live applications on customer data in a matter of days – has compressed sales cycles from months to weeks in some cases, with several organizations signing seven-figure deals shortly after participating.
Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andrusko wrote a few days ago about the “palantirization of everything” and how his “universal playbook” was much envied in Silicon Valley, but difficult to replicate. “Palantir’s pitch—dropping a small team into a messy environment, connecting local and siled systems, and shipping a custom working platform in a matter of months—is compelling,” he wrote, but Palantir is in a “class of its own,” similar to the way many companies marketed themselves as platforms in the 2010s, but very few actually did.
Government column, commercial breakthrough
As Wall Street’s attention increasingly turns to Palantir’s businesses, the company’s government business remains a cornerstone, providing software to the U.S. military, other branches of the Pentagon and allied militaries. Government revenues continued to grow over the latest period, even as management acknowledged continued macroeconomic difficulties in Europe and irregularities related to large contracts.
For 2026, Palantir forecasts annual revenue between $7.18 billion and $7.2 billion, implying growth of around 60% and well above consensus expectations. For the current quarter, the company achieved revenue of approximately $1.53 billion to $1.54 billion, again above analyst estimates and signaling a slight slowdown in enterprise AI spending despite greater market volatility.
Commenting that forward guidance is “incredibly important for a company like Palantir” that has such a high price-to-earnings ratio, Jake Behan, Direxion’s head of capital markets, said the very confident outlook for 2026 “just raised the bar.”
Traders needed proof of commercial AI at scale more than skyrocketing profits, he added, and Palantir’s 115%-plus growth forecast provided just that. “What is clear right now is that the market rewards not AI hype, but production,” Behan said, pointing to the 130% growth in U.S. commercial revenue as proof that Palantir is actually deploying AI at scale. It’s well-positioned as a company both showing AI in real-world workflows and generating real revenue, with a “broader monetization test going on in the market right now,” he explained.
Karp said Palantir’s exceptionally strong performance is actually a problem for the company, in that other tech companies and countries outside the U.S. and China have to ask themselves how they can compete: “Can we produce companies that produce what we produce in one quarter a year? And one of the things we need to figure out in the West is how do we do that?” He said this puts “enormous political pressure on our institutions” because political leaders struggle to figure out how to deliver value “while there is a disproportion of haves and have-nots.”
According to Karp, at Palantir, “the haves are the workers and the people who actually know how to use these products. And even the truth on the ground is very far from what people intuitively believe. Actually, it’s not the capitalist versus the workers. It’s the capitalists and the workers. But it’s very confusing for political leaders.”
Updated February 2, 2026: This article has been updated with analyst reactions and comments from Palantir’s earnings call.
