Palantir Technologies Q3 FY26 Earnings Call | $PLTR | 🔴 WATCH LIVE

Humanity is facing a world-historic crossroads in how it chooses to deal with AI. And through it all, our genre-defining technology has led the way, redefining the industry.

We've been shaping the AI revolution from its start, and despite being only at the very beginning of the sovereign AI revolution, we already see how it is transforming the size of the market. We achieved revenue growth of 96% year-over-year and 20% sequentially, the highest growth rates we've ever delivered as a public company. These results are the continued financial expression of the transformational impact we're delivering for our customers, which is also evident in the depth of our customer relationships.

The third quarter average trailing 12-month revenue from our top 20 customers increased 76% year-over-year to $146 million per customer. Our US business is in overdrive. We brought in $1.9 billion in US revenue, which grew 119% year-over-year and 23% sequentially, representing 84% of our total revenue.

This is led by our US commercial business, which grew 148% year-over-year and 29% sequentially and surpassed our US government business revenue in the quarter for the first time. In US commercial, the average trailing 12-month revenue per customer grew 88% year-over-year and 20% sequentially. The US continues to be the epicenter of the AI revolution.

I won't repeat what I said last quarter because it has become self-evident in our unparalleled results. Two years ago, we led the way with our commoditized cognition thesis. And today, the market is only beginning to recognize the full force of sovereign AI.

It's pervasive in the conversations I'm having with customers and undeniable in the results they've shared. The COO of Optum Serve highlighted, quote, 'Sovereignty doesn't mean that we have to build everything ourselves. What it does mean, though, is protecting what differentiates us while retaining the ability to evolve, to adapt, and to scale our solutions as our customers' needs change, and they change often. It means knowing where the right partner can help us move faster.'

L3Harris noted that by fine-tuning open-source models on its own data, a sovereign model outperformed the frontier model it had been using in less than 48 hours and cut cost by 95% in preliminary results.

NVIDIA reported that by evaluating and post-training its open models, it was able to get its smallest, most efficient model to outperform its largest model by a large gap and can now retrain that model on just a single GPU in a couple of hours, enabling them to retrain any time they have data to improve the decision intelligence.

They stated, quote, 'We captured our alpha and we trained it into a model. We couldn't have started this process until we built the workflows in Palantir.' And our customers are choosing Palantir and our sovereign AI to transform their organizations at a furious pace.

An industrial materials company piloted a nearly $3 million engagement in Q2 2026 before converting to a $29 million ACV deal last quarter. A global athletic company converted a $1.6 million pilot that began in Q1 2026 into an approximately $21 million ACV deal last quarter. A global home appliance company converted a $1 million pilot that began in Q2 2026 into a $3 million ACV deal within the same quarter, then expanded nearly five-fold to a $15 million ACV deal in Q3 across commercial, finance, and supply chain workflows. After an agent camp in Q2 2026, an apparel company signed a $2.5 million pilot. Then last quarter, they converted to an $11.5 million ACV deal. These commitments are downstream of the measurable impact we're delivering with our customers.

With Palantir sovereign AI, McCarthy Building Companies will save 30,000 hours annually by using post-trained Neotron to help turn complex project requirements into contract language that allocates risk and clearly defined subcontractor obligations.

Tampa General is deploying sovereign AI to keep sensitive data and model processing local while enforcing its own risk and privacy standards for LLM traffic and supporting the granular controls Tampa General wants to define for itself using fine-tuned and post-trained Neotron to achieve this outcome. Together, we also improved model performance by 7% and reduced latency by 22x.

Turning to our US government business, revenue grew 96% year-over-year and 18% sequentially, demonstrating continued extraordinary impact across civil and defense with Maven as our foundational work. In Q3, the Army awarded Palantir a prime agreement to produce eight Titan systems. And last quarter, FAA highlighted the impact of our work together, stating, quote, 'That shift from scattered data to an embedded ontology is what changes the game. This is a modernization in operational form, changing how safety work gets done,' and noted that the work they can do now would require hundreds of analysts without Palantir.

As I reflect on our results, I see the furious pace continuing unabated. I'm invigorated, unlike ever before, by the ambition I'm hearing from our customers and their demand for sovereign AI. A revolution, we should remember, is barely one quarter old. As extraordinary as these results are, they are only the opening chapter of sovereign AI. I'll now turn it over to Shyam.

Thanks, Ryan. Palantir is obsessed with turning tokens into economic value. It's clear that the vast majority of economically valuable problems that LLMs can solve can be solved with intelligence at or below the frontier. So what's preventing this from happening? On one end, you have the model makers who can't conceive of solving any problem except through model improvement, so they aren't even trying. And on the other end, you have the hard work of diffusion, which sounds passive, but is anything but. All the value comes from the elegant integration of AI, software, and humans. And this requires not a harness for the model, but something closer to a harness for the enterprise, which is exactly what AIP is.

Most profoundly, the conceit that the labs have wrong is the belief that the atomic unit of the enterprise is the individual knowledge worker. It is not. The fundamental unit of the enterprise is the workflow. You can make any set of workers more productive and generate no actual ROI. For some things like coding, the knowledge worker is the workflow, so there's perfect product-market fit. But for the vast majority of the enterprise, it is not. Given this, it is incredibly valuable that AIP implements enterprise workflows and is able to bring AI to it in a way that generates objective, quantifiable value. For example, page 209 of Anthropic's S-1 talks about AIG's automation of insurance underwriting processes for complex commercial lines of business. That entire workflow and the elegant application of AI, software, and humans runs in AIP and was implemented by Palantir and AIG.

We are the diffusion layer not just of choice but of necessity.

There's a clear pattern emerging amongst our customers who are most successful at getting value from AI. They have enormous ambition. Their goal is not something lame like opex reduction. It's market domination. And the opposite is true. Customers that struggle the most are narrowly focused on reducing cost. AI is a new type of intelligence. Simply trying to shoehorn it into replacing the human misses the moment completely. The error of conflating human and machine intelligence locks you into a poorly chosen goal, one that limits your ambition and still remains out of reach.

Instead, we're attacking all the work the enterprise knows it should be doing, but historically lacked the economic resources or capabilities to take on: an agent swarm watching each patient in the ICU ward to help clinicians avoid potential signs of sepsis earlier and improve patient outcomes; an agent swarm per wellhead in the Permian Basin to maximize production; an agent swarm for every customer of our customer to drive growth. This is not about doing the same thing cheaper. It's about defining the productive work that goes beyond yesterday's frontier and capturing and compounding the new economic value it creates, and doing so with sovereign AI.

The examples are everywhere now. It's clear that post-training on your specific operational data in ontology enables better-than-frontier performance on weights you control, protecting your alpha. Yes, it's cheaper, but the dominant variable is that more use cases can actually get to the threshold of viability for machine intelligence to generate economic value when elegantly integrated into your enterprise. And our product investments in AIP to create a closed-loop model factory are making this easy and fast.

The specific post-trained model is a commodity item. The compounding value is in the post-training pipeline that is constantly fed from your operational exhaust captured in the ontology that drives automated post-training runs, model checkpoints, evaluations, and deployment across yesterday's, today's, and tomorrow's open-weight ecosystem. Our new feature of auto-research and continued investment in AIP Evolve push us closer and closer to an automated loop to build, deploy, and evaluate intelligence continuously against ROI.

In AIP and sovereign AI, the Pareto optimal frontier is no longer an unachievable academic aspiration. It is a simple function call, and one we can invoke automatically on your behalf.

At a recent PACOM exercise, we deployed a 30 billion parameter post-trained model into space, weight, power, cooling constrained compute ready for the disconnected fight with superior task-specific performance than GPT-5, a three trillion parameter model. L3Harris realized 95% cost reduction with sovereign AI. McCarthy will save 30,000 hours a year on subcontractor drafting, achieving better-than-frontier performance on RFI classification and subcontractor drafting on a post-trained Neotron 4 billion parameter model, where again the real value is the substantially greater number of demand events they can process.

Now Maven continues to deliver for the joint force, exceeding 100,000 users. Maven is now available to all of the services beyond just the combatant commands and many combat support agencies. We just concluded a Maven hackathon. 46 teams across the joint force participated. Many amazing projects were built by our 25,000-strong builder community. The winning two teams were both Army teams: one building an edge planning and simulation capability for force protection, and a second place an incredible platform to analyze drone incursions to drive force protection insights.

And we continue to feel demand for Maven down to the tactical edge and disconnected environments ashore and afloat. We have seen incredible success with DORA, disconnected ontology, resilient architecture, including in the Army's jailbreak effort. DORA is an embedded compute device that brings Maven's capabilities to disconnected operations. Using AIP, service members can build read/write integrations with legacy sensors and effectors and bring them online in hours entirely unassisted. With that, I'll turn it over to Dave.

Welcome to our earnings call. And you know, I think for many, many years, our earnings calls were really about our earnings. Now it is the focal point of tech society and general trends. And I think many, if not most, people who are watching this — and it is by far the most watched earnings call in the world — it's the one where people come to figure out what's going on on the ground floor. And given that AI and sovereign AI is changing the universe, in our case for tremendous good, and is showing up in our numbers, people really want to have a sense of, well, what is actually happening in the world politically, sociologically, anthropologically, and of course financially.

So, you know, given that demand and in Palantir, and the reality that this moment has become a real focal point of understanding, and quite frankly, many investors watching this are watching it to figure out what's going on with their investments and not even primarily Palantir. And so there's this larger question of what does it mean to have a business that was built around what we believed and believe now is the most important mission in the world, supporting our warfighters, bringing them home, where even as much as a year ago, two years ago, that people even involved inside Palantir viewed the core value of our business economically as Glazer would look at it, and quite frankly, you know, in a very helpful way, he's the force of greed. You know, Glazer's view of our business was, 'Could you talk a little more about commercial?' Over the past year, past couple years, and in this quarter, our commercial business eclipsed our government business.

And in fact, the market value of that probably justifies our current valuation, given we're growing at 90 — our aggregate business is growing at 96%. The juggernaut of US commercial — I mean, these numbers are so far outside the bounds of what you could — I mean, outside the bounds of what even the most optimistic people could think a business like ours could do while maintaining a way of going to market that is completely sui generis. We have products that are unique, we have ways of going to the market that are unique. We were the leader of a revolution that was in front of us, but none of us really were able to put our name on the sovereign revolution.

Meaning people need to understand how AI can create value, how you can create value out of tokens, how you can keep the value of your own alpha, how is it not transferred to anyone else, and how can you expand it. That revolution, of course, is happening in America, and then these out-of-bounds results, of which we're a metaphor, really show you the future is becoming the present, and the present is now. You see it in Europe, which, you know, it's been half my life, and at this point we should kind of avoid talking about it because of what's going on, and it doesn't help to just, you know, stamp on them. But you see it across America.

You see the reaction to AI, you see the polarization politically. It's because all the value in the market is actually moving to the vehicles, in this case Palantir, and really very few others — Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia — where you can actually make a claim that there is some value creation. Again, it's so extreme that a business that was viewed as a nice-to-have part of our business as late as three years ago is now the dominant part of our business. That business grew 29% quarter-on-quarter. It's almost at 150% growth, and it's dragging our US growth number over 100%.

These are just bombastic, and we did this while attacking the market the way we attack it. Very few salespeople, very impossible way to understand how we're capturing this juggernaut unless you view it as a completely new and different moment. And so when people are watching this, like, what is happening in the market? What is happening in our society? It really is the case that the playbook, the products, the way of going to market do not work in most cases. But the things that do just spring alive. And you know, our somewhat crazy aspiration to take the whole market doesn't look that crazy right now.

You know, and we believe at this company, and many of the people watching it, we do not only have a financial reason for taking the whole market, which Glazer is salivating at. We, on the mission side, we believe we have a mission reason for taking the market. And that mission reason is: we support your alpha, we support your sovereignty. We've done this for over 20 years. We support the warfighter. We are delighted that we can support the warfighter even more because we're making so much money. But we believe we have a moral imperative to be the dominant player in our industry broadly defined, including all AI applications and the use of models open and closed, especially training open-weight models, and that moral imperative drives every part of our business.

The interesting thing about the internal dynamic of our business: it's not only that the sum of the parts in our business is stronger. That's obvious. 96% growth. Look at our Rule of 40. It's 158. It's almost jaw-dropping. But the parts of our business, the individual parts, the parts that the people at this company are running, those parts are stronger than they were before. Every part. And that's what you're seeing in these numbers, and arguably for most people watching, that's what you're seeing in broader society.

And this move from the future to the present is the reason why many of the classical approaches to business — there was an idea they were going to fail in five years — that doesn't work. You have to execute now and in the present. And this company, Palantir, and everyone involved, and all the people watching this who are on our side, of which there are many, many people, are part of that movement. And that's why we're so really happy and honestly quite optimistic about the future, especially in the US.

Well, you know, I mean, what's really shifted on the front line is like there used to be this long walk up to people like talking to us, and then you do a pilot, and then you try to get a long pilot, and then you kind of lock that in because the same way you lock in like hire all these salespeople so that the market believes you're going to have sales kind of thing. Now it's much more, you know, people are — it's super heterogeneous. So some people, everybody basically comes in on the spectrum of 'what I have doesn't work now, and I've heard what you have does work.' That's usually where it starts.

They also strongly believe and are quite tired of what they believe the reality is: 'my IP is in danger and I'm getting no value.' And this is when we started talking about sovereignty. This was kind of something that was being expressed, they felt, but they didn't know how to articulate. Now it's something they articulate, and they've gone from anger to action. Like it's like they've gone from thinking, 'Hey, I'm not in a great marriage' to 'I'm at the divorce.' And like they come, and then what's very special now is they're surrounded by people who've had the same journey, and that the timeline from interaction to them buying pilots or going into production is completely shifted.

And so what like Ryan and I are seeing on the front line in commercial is, you know, this much quicker interaction, much quicker to deployment, shorter duration of the contract, but then an ability to expand that contract dramatically because as soon as you go in there and you show them that you can, for example, train open models in our ontology, those models are valuable and you have beyond-frontier capacity without losing the alpha, you just are hooked. What we have to do internally is figure out how to re-resource our company to focus exclusively on those people because we don't have even the bandwidth to do that.

So, but that's because like every single time we go into the conference — like in the past, you would be — we go into a conference and people are like warm leads turn into hot leads. This is like first date into bed kind of thing, you know, maybe that's not the right metaphor for this, but it's like it's a very different jam. It's like we've gone this way. We've gone from being the most attractive person in the physics department to being the captain of the football team kind of thing. I mean, not that I did that, but this is like a completely different jam of like what's going on.

And then it's also different on our end because we know we can deliver on use cases no one else can deliver on. So like even today we're going over use case after use case with like a super — like one of the most important companies, and I'm going to go see them, and basically it's like I'm gonna instead of saying 'hey, get' — which is like 'let's just get started, you have this crucial problem for your business, we know we can deliver on this in weeks, this will change the trajectory of your business.' And it's in a weird way it's much, much closer to what we were doing in the beginning in the US government where we were like 'hey, we're just going to get started,' we knew we could prove it with PG, and then we — but it's like at a much more massive scale.

So instead of being like 250K, it's like $25 million to start. And honestly, the general vibe is if this actually works, it's worth infinite value, and it will work. And quite frankly, I do not see how other offerings are going to work because this is both product and artistry. It's not just — that's why these numbers are so bombastic. It's not like some static — like when Shyam's on the front line doing implementations or Ryan is structuring these — I mean, Ryan was so busy the last couple days of last quarter he couldn't get out of his car.

We were like — we about — I was about to send over a bottle so he could like, you know, take care of nature. It was like it's like that on the front line, like, and I'm not even — I'm not exaggerating. It's like I'm like Ryan was on his way to work and like he had to pull over. He drives a fancy car. I mean, look at that. But, you know, it's, you know, but he literally had to pull over. And that's just what's going on.

And again, I know like the primary focus of your interest here is financial, but there's the flip side. The other stuff is not working. That's part of it. It's not just that our thing is unique. There's a very strong sense in the market that these other approaches — fake deploy codes, token raw usage, lightweight companies reselling tokens, software companies that are reselling tokens and it counts as revenue — people are just tired of it.

And I'll tell you last not least, the taste of the market is shifting. Like people really do grow to like what works. I mean, look at the success in the Department of War, you know, it's like that was a — we shifted the taste. That's what's happening in US commercial, that's what's explaining the numbers, and that's what — if you like people watching this, you should come, you should come to one of our, you know, AIP sovereign — you know, it's a little bit like a rock concert.

There's two parts to your question, which is like, you know, the person who's not convinced or not yet convinced, and then what do we do? The weird thing here, though, is we really cannot satiate demand. So this is a market that is growing so rapidly. We don't need the people who aren't convinced. We really don't. And by the way, and again, I say this every time, Dario is someone I get along very well with. I think he's one of the most important business people of my generation, if not multiple generations. They are also selling our product because people interact with them. And again, some people want that approach, but a lot of people are super concerned about their alpha being transferred to them.

And the results, even the results they talk about, are often already in our application. Lately, we work very effectively with Anthropic in the Department of War and at AIG and all over the place. But again, the primary — what they are doing is increasing the size of the market. What we're doing is servicing the market that's gotten real, and we are actually in a symbiotic relationship with them commercially because they're growing a market that's probably much, much bigger than it is today, and we're taking advantage of the market where it really — where you really need delivery, where delivery also includes now.

If there is somebody we don't — we really do convincing in the government space. Like we've been on the front line, like certain agencies didn't want to adopt, and we knew that warfighters would die if they didn't adopt. So we went to convince them. In commercial, our real approach is, you know, hey, enjoy the one you're with till you just find out it's not the one you want. You know, there are very, very, very few times where we're trying to go and compete and take their customer away. It really is not happening.

And conversely, you know, once you go Palantir, you don't go back. And that's just how it is. And you can see it in our numbers, which is — so this is a very different thing. I don't know at what point we become competitive with each other, but at this point in the US, the market for us is insatiable. It's insatiable and growing and growing and growing. You know, there's what — two ways to look at our numbers. One is to say we are just sublime at what we do. Another way is to say we're very unique and the market is exploding around us. I'm much more in the latter camp.

Like I don't — we are a creative colony. We're not perfect, but the market is exploding around us, and they are helping it explode. And the only area where we do anything that looks competitive is we are spending a lot of time educating clients, partners that may never — that are non-partners, around the risks of using closed models without an application layer. That's the one thing we do do actively. So, but we're not really saying, hey, you're going to — you know, the value creation people know we own this certainly in industry. I think less on Wall Street.

Actually, honestly, I think on Wall Street — I don't mean you, but I think really what happened on Wall Street is everybody invested in these firms early. Bless you guys. It's hard to see the reality when you're getting rich on something that's not actually working the way you think it is. And the reality is, though, in industry, people realize when it gets real, you need us. And that market is much larger than we can service.