Palantir Q2 2026 Earnings: Revenue Up 93%, Stock Soars

Palantir did not just clear the bar — it detonated it. After the close on Monday, August 3, 2026, Palantir Technologies (PLTR) reported second-quarter results that beat every headline estimate, accelerated at a scale almost no software company has sustained, and prompted an unusually blunt reaction from a CEO not known for restraint. Revenue grew 93% year over year, U.S. commercial revenue soared 149%, and management raised its full-year outlook for the third consecutive quarter. The stock jumped roughly 12% in after-hours trading.

Heading into the print, the debate was never whether Palantir would beat — it was whether beating could possibly be enough for a stock priced at one of the richest multiples in the S&P 500. As our earnings preview laid out, consensus called for about $1.81 billion in revenue and $0.34 in adjusted earnings per share, with the options market pricing a double-digit post-earnings swing. Palantir cleared the top-line estimate by a wide margin and, more importantly, delivered the acceleration bulls had been counting on rather than the deceleration bears expected at this scale.

The quarter by the numbers

Palantir posted second-quarter revenue of $1.935 billion, up 93% year over year and 19% sequentially — a growth rate that accelerated from the roughly 80% pace consensus had modeled. Adjusted earnings came in at $0.41 per share, ahead of the $0.33 analysts expected.

Profitability kept pace with growth, which is the combination that has always separated Palantir from the typical hypergrowth software story:

• GAAP operating income reached $912 million, a 47% GAAP operating margin — a figure most profitable software companies never approach even at maturity.
• Adjusted operating income hit $1.19 billion, a 62% adjusted operating margin, above the top end of the company’s own guidance.
• Palantir’s Rule of 40 score — revenue growth plus operating margin, the shorthand investors use to judge whether a software company is balancing expansion against profit — climbed to 155%. A healthy score is 40.

The bookings figures underpinning the quarter were just as striking. Total contract value (TCV) closed in the quarter was $3.37 billion, up 49% year over year, and the U.S. commercial segment set a record with $2.13 billion in TCV, up 153%. Bookings that outrun recognized revenue are the leading indicator that matters most for a land-and-expand software model, and Palantir’s are running well ahead.

Commercial overtook government — nearly

For most of its public life, Palantir was a Washington story: intelligence agencies, the military, and a reputation as the data company for the national-security state. That center of gravity has shifted, and this quarter it nearly tipped.

U.S. commercial revenue reached $764 million, up 149% year over year and 28% sequentially, and now accounts for roughly 49% of total revenue — a hair short of overtaking the government book for the first time. The trajectory has been steep and consistent: commercial grew 133% in the first quarter and reaccelerated here, off a base that is no longer small. The crossover matters because it changes how the company should be valued. A government contractor is judged on backlog and appropriations; a fast-growing enterprise-software vendor is judged on net revenue retention and the economics of expanding inside existing accounts. The market is increasingly pricing Palantir as the latter, and this quarter gave it more reason to.

The engine behind the surge remains Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), the product management credits for pulling large enterprises off pilots and into paid, expanding deployments. Palantir’s pitch is that its long-standing data-integration layer — the unglamorous work of connecting messy corporate systems — is exactly the plumbing that makes large language models useful inside a business rather than a chatbot bolted onto a dashboard. That positioning puts it in direct competition with a widening field of enterprise agent platforms from the frontier labs and hyperscalers, each racing to own the layer where AI models meet corporate data and workflows.

Karp’s “otherworldly” quarter

CEO Alex Karp, whose shareholder letters are as much manifesto as financial commentary, did not hold back. “This quarter was otherworldly,” he wrote, pointing to the 149% U.S. commercial growth, the 93% overall growth, and the 155% Rule of 40 score. In an interview after the release, Karp told CNBC to “forget consensus,” adding that “to my knowledge, no business at our scale has even grown half this much.”

The rhetoric is characteristic, but the underlying claim is hard to dispute on the numbers. Very few companies generating close to $2 billion in quarterly revenue are also accelerating past a 90% growth rate, and fewer still are doing it while posting GAAP operating margins near 50%. Whatever one thinks of the valuation, the operational quarter was, by the metrics, exceptional.

Guidance raised again

Palantir lifted its full-year outlook for the third straight quarter, and the size of the raise is what drew the after-hours bid. The company now guides to full-year 2026 revenue of $8.150 billion to $8.158 billion, implying roughly 82% annual growth and up sharply from the prior range near $7.66 billion. It raised U.S. commercial revenue guidance to more than $3.42 billion, implying at least 134% growth for the year, from a prior figure around $3.22 billion.

Management also lifted its profit and cash-flow targets: adjusted income from operations guidance rose to $4.889 billion to $4.897 billion, and adjusted free cash flow guidance climbed to $4.5 billion to $4.7 billion. Each quarter this year, Palantir has raised the annual outlook; the market had come to treat a repeat as the baseline, so the tell was the magnitude of the increase — and this one was substantial. For readers parsing the distinction between a headline beat and a durable guidance raise, that difference is exactly the kind of nuance the gap between a 10-K and a 10-Q is built to surface.

The valuation still looms

None of the operational strength resolves the tension that has defined the stock: price. Even after Monday’s pop, Palantir trades at a revenue multiple that dwarfs the rest of the software sector, and its heavily retail shareholder base makes the reaction to any given quarter hard to predict. Earlier this year, beat-and-raise prints were occasionally met with selloffs as investors used strong results as an exit rather than an entry — a pattern that recurred across the AI complex as the market began rotating between AI hardware and software winners.

This time, the reaction was unambiguously positive, at least initially. A 93% growth rate accelerating rather than fading, paired with a large guidance raise, gave even skeptical investors less room to argue the trajectory is topping out. Whether the enthusiasm holds through the next few sessions — and whether it survives contact with the rest of a heavy megacap earnings calendar — is a separate question from the quality of the quarter itself.

What it means

Palantir delivered the cleanest possible answer to the question hanging over it: the AIP flywheel is accelerating, not plateauing. A company approaching $2 billion in quarterly revenue that grows 93% year over year, raises full-year guidance by a wide margin, and posts a 155% Rule of 40 score is executing at a level the enterprise-software sector has essentially never seen at this scale. The near-crossover of commercial revenue past government cements the strategic shift that has been underway for two years, and the record $2.13 billion in U.S. commercial bookings suggests the pipeline supporting future quarters is deepening, not thinning.

The risk still lives entirely in the multiple. At a valuation that prices years of uninterrupted hypergrowth, the bar rises with every beat, and a single decelerating quarter could puncture sentiment quickly. But that is a forward risk, not a verdict on this print. As one of the few pure-play beneficiaries of enterprises actually deploying AI — rather than the capex-heavy hyperscalers building the infrastructure — Palantir offers one of the cleaner reads available on whether corporate AI spending is translating into revenue. This quarter, the read was emphatic.

What to watch next: whether U.S. commercial growth holds near triple digits into the back half of the year; whether the record TCV converts into recognized revenue on schedule; whether margins stay near 50% without leaning on dilution; and, not least, whether the stock can hold Monday’s gains once the season’s remaining earnings — including a closely watched AI-chip read from the semiconductor names — reset the market’s appetite for paying up. For one night, at least, Palantir gave the bulls exactly what they came for.