‘We are an n of 1’: Palantir hails ‘incredible’ earnings as stock rockets nearly 8% after hours

Investors cheered a powerful combination of faster growth, fatter margins, and a revenue outlook “crushing consensus expectations,” prompting a sharp rebound in a stock that had stumbled to start the year.

‘Incredible’ quarter tops forecasts

The Denver-based company reported fourth-quarter revenue of about $1.41 billion, topping analyst expectations and marking another record period for the company famously named after a magical object from 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” level of 127%. CEO Alex Karp attributed this to Palantir being the only company “choosing to exclusively focus on scaling the operational leverage made possible by the rapid advancements of AI models, a trend that we first called ‘commodity cognition’ well before others started repeating it.”

Palantir’s AI platform remained the main growth engine, particularly in the U.S. commercial market, where revenue and customer counts have been climbing at a breakneck pace.​ The company’s “boot camp” go-to-market model—short, intensive workshops where Palantir teams build live applications on customer data in days—has compressed sales cycles from months to weeks in some cases, with several organizations signing seven-figure deals shortly after attending.

Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andrusko wrote several days ago about the “Palantirization of everything” and how its “universal playbook” was much envied in Silicon Valley, yet difficult to replicate. “The Palantir pitch—parachute a small team into a messy environment, wire together homegrown, siloed systems, and ship a customized working platform in months—is compelling,” he wrote, but Palantir is a “category of one,” similar to how many companies pitched themselves as platforms in the 2010s, but very few actually were.

Government backbone, commercial breakout

While Wall Street’s focus has increasingly turned to Palantir’s enterprise roster, the company’s government business remains a cornerstone, supplying software to the U.S. Army, other Pentagon branches, and allied militaries. Government revenue continued to grow in the latest period, even as management acknowledged persistent macro headwinds in Europe and lumpiness tied to large contracts. ​

Looking ahead to 2026, Palantir forecast full-year revenue between $7.18 billion and $7.2 billion, implying growth of around 60% and handily beating consensus expectations.

For the current quarter, the company guided to about $1.53 billion to $1.54 billion in sales, again above analyst estimates and signaling little slowdown in enterprise AI spending despite broader market volatility.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.