Palantir’s AI story finally looks like a business

Palantir $PLTR has spent the better part of a decade being argued about. Is it a government contractor with great marketing, or is it a software company that happens to sell to governments? Is it early, or is it already priced like the ending?

Monday, Palantir showed up to earnings looking like a company that knows it’s being priced like a prophecy — and then decided to act accordingly. Growth was fast. Profits were real. And the story the company told about where its momentum is coming from lined up neatly with the results. The stock has spent the last year training the market to expect a sturdy drumbeat of “AI, AI, AI — but in production,” and this quarter’s release leaned into the same premise: customers are signing, deployments are expanding, and the business is throwing off real cash.

Fourth-quarter revenue came in at $1.4 billion, up 70% year over year and 19% quarter over quarter, with GAAP EPS of $0.24 and adjusted EPS of $0.25. GAAP operating income was $575 million for a 41% margin, and GAAP net income was $609 million for a 43% margin — the kind of profitability that tends to quiet the nice-demo crowd for at least a few hours.

Investors treated it like a clean beat-and-raise, with shares jumping about 7% in extended trading. The outlook is above what Wall Street had penciled in (consensus revenue around $1.33 billion and adjusted EPS of $0.23), and the stock moved like the forecast did more work than the quarter itself.

The topline beat is straightforward, but the more interesting part is where the strength is coming from. Palantir put the U.S. front and center, with commercial adoption called out as the headline driver — the section of the company that has historically been treated as “nice if it happens." U.S. revenue rose 93% to $1.1 billion, with U.S. commercial revenue up 137% to $507 million and U.S. government revenue up 66% to $570 million. The market has been waiting to see whether Palantir’s commercial push can keep compounding, and not merely coexist with its government core.

Then came the sales receipts.

Palantir said it closed 180 deals of at least $1 million, 84 deals of at least $5 million, and 61 deals of at least $10 million. Total contract value hit $4.3 billion, up 138% year over year, while U.S. commercial remaining deal value climbed to $4.4 billion, up 145%.

Palantir is pitching itself as an efficiency machine, not just an AI beneficiary. It flagged a Rule of 40 score of 127% and an adjusted operating margin of 57% in the quarter — a neat way of saying it can grow fast and still throw off cash. CEO Alex Karp said in the earnings release, “We are an N of 1.”

Guidance is where the quarter stopped being a backward-looking victory lap and turned into a forward-looking dare. For Q1 2026, Palantir guided revenue to around $1.5 billion. For full-year 2026, it forecast around $7.2 billion in revenue and said U.S. commercial revenue should exceed $3.1 billion, implying at least 115% growth there. The company also projected adjusted free cash flow of $3.9–$4.1 billion and promised GAAP operating income and net income in every quarter of 2026.

But the catch is obvious: Palantir shares still trade for about 142 times expected earnings, the third-highest multiple in the S&P 500. Monday’s earnings strengthened the case that Palantir can earn its swagger, but the rest of 2026 is about repetition — because expensive stocks don’t get graded on improvement. They get graded on inevitability.