Palantir stock rises 16% on soaring commercial revenue, AI sovereignty

Palantir soared in premarket trading on Tuesday after the company reported “otherworldly” second-quarter earnings driven by customer demand for AI sovereign tools.

The enterprise software giant reported a 93% growth in overall revenue to $1.94 billion, up from around $1 billion a year ago, and beating LSEG estimates of $1.8 billion. Its commercial revenue jumped 149% to $764 million, and government revenue grew 90% to $809 million.

The company expects full-year revenue between $8.15 billion and $8.158 and commercial revenue in excess of $3.424 billion. Palantir was last up 16.3% in premarket trading.

Palantir’s Co-founder and CEO Alex Karp described the quarter as “otherworldly,” adding that the sovereign AI revolution makes them “very optimistic about the future.”

“Forget consensus,” Karp told CNBC’s Seema Mody in an exclusive interview. “To my knowledge, no businesses at our scale has even grown half this much.”

Palantir, which designs systems that help companies integrate AI with their existing systems and data, pinned its blowout earnings on growing demand for AI sovereignty as companies seek to keep their data private from frontier AI labs like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta.

In a letter to shareholders, Karp said “the revolution for independence and AI sovereignty is now well underway,” noting that the business has “Marxist” values.

“Our customers have declined to become vassal states of the language labs,” Karp said in the letter. “Every organization in the world is awakening to the risks of handing the creators of the language models the keys to their institutions, of letting the models loose within their homes.”

The company’s stock has declined 29% so far this year as investors increasingly become cautious on the AI trade.

Despite this, Citi analysts said in a note on Tuesday that Palantir’s results “further weaken the bear case around rising AI competition,” as demand for data privacy from AI companies sets it apart. Companies rely on Palantir’s technology to integrate their software, while also making demands to keep their data private from AI models.

“In our view, the results reinforce Palantir’s position as one of the clearest beneficiaries of enterprise AI adoption, with accelerating commercial demand demonstrating the company is benefitting from similar demand as the fastest AI natives on the market,” the analysts said in a previous note on Monday.

“We expect shares up meaningfully given the significant snapback in U.S. Commercial performance, which pushes back against slowing growth,” they added.