Palantir shares surged as much as 25% in morning trading on Tuesday after the company lifted its full-year outlook and reported accelerating growth in its U.S. commercial sales.
Revenue nearly doubled in the second quarter, the technology company told investors Monday. Executives now expect between $8.15 billion and $8.16 billion in full-year revenue, including U.S. commercial revenue growing at least 134% to $3.42 billion.
The new forecast is a significant increase. Palantir previously forecast full-year revenue to come in under $7.7 billion.
“Demand for AI sovereignty has now been unleashed,” Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir, said. “Our customers trust us to provide them with maximal control over their operations, data and decisions. Their competitive advantage should never become the training data for future models.”
Karp described second-quarter results as “otherworldly,” with overall revenue up 93% to $1.94 billion on a year-over-year basis. For the current third quarter, the company expects revenue of about $2.16 billion.
The company reported a second-quarter profit of $1.06 billion, or 41 cents a share, for the quarter ended June 30. That compares with a profit of $326.7 million, or 13 cents a share, in the same period last year.
Stripping out certain one-time items, Palantir logged adjusted earnings of 41 cents a share. Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting 34 cents a share.
“We know we need the best results because people aren’t buying our product because we’re swinging the golf club correctly or paying for the steak dinner,” Karp said during a livestreamed question-and-answer session.
Karp has become one of the most outspoken CEOs of an established tech company to take issue with how AI labs, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, do business, including how much they charge for tokens, or units of AI use.
“Companies are paying to give away their most important secrets, the very basis for their competitive advantage,” Ryan Taylor, Palantir’s chief revenue and chief legal officer, said during the livestream.
Palantir recently released a white paper—entitled: “Institutional Sovereignty in the Age of AI”—that laid out 15 steps companies and governments could take to protect themselves.
Some of the largest U.S. companies, as well as the government, are clients of Palantir. Karp said in a July interview with CNBC that “at every single enterprise I deal with, these people are livid; they’re like, ‘I am paying for tokens that create no value.’ ”
