Palantir Technologies reported a blowout first quarter, saying revenue rose 85% year-on-year to $1.63 billion as its US business more than doubled, driven by rapid growth across both commercial and government customers.
The company said in its Q1 report, published on Monday, that US revenue jumped 104% to $1.28 billion, with commercial revenue up 133% to $595 million and government revenue up 84% to $687 million. The results beat Wall Street estimates, and the company also raised its full-year guidance, saying it now expects 2026 revenue of up to $7.66 billion, implying annual growth of around 71%.
CEO Alex Karp, who has increasingly framed Palantir’s AI tools as central to Western military and industrial power, said the “twin pistons of our US business are now firing in sync.”
“We believe it is not hyperbolic to say that nearly all AI workflows that actually create value – especially on the battlefield – are built on Palantir,” Karp wrote in an accompanying letter to shareholders, stating that the company “was founded to strengthen US national security, to protect Americans and their freedom.”
Palantir – named after the obsidian seeing-stones from J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’, through which the dark lord Sauron keeps watch over his underlings – is a software company that primarily serves the defense and intelligence sectors.
Palantir’s flagship product is a system called Gotham, which pulls together and analyzes satellite footage, human intelligence from the CIA, signals intelligence from the NSA, and other data that might otherwise take days to sift through.
Gotham and MOSAIC – another Palantir target-identification program that pulls digital data, including surveillance footage and IP addresses, from a target area – use AI to label the most effective targets for military strikes.
The US has acknowledged that it uses these programs to select targets in the war against Iran, but insists that humans make the final decision to fire. Abroad, Palantir’s technology is used by the UK Defense Ministry, the Israel Defense Forces, and the Ukrainian military.
The company’s earnings update came weeks after Palantir drew criticism for a 22-point manifesto summarizing themes from Karp’s book ‘The Technological Republic’. The manifesto argued that Silicon Valley has an obligation to take part in national defense, that “hard power” will be built on software, and that AI weapons are inevitable. Critics have called it a blueprint for “technofascism.”