Palantir Technologies delivered a blowout fourth quarter, reporting 70% year-over-year revenue growth to $1.41 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.25. The company generated $791 million in free cash flow and achieved a 57% operating margin, underscoring its ability to convert record bookings into high-margin profitability. Remaining performance obligations jumped to $2.48 billion, up 143% from a year earlier, while net revenue retention held at an industry-leading 139%. Management guided full-year 2026 revenue to $7.2 billion, reflecting 61% growth driven by accelerating product adoption across both government and commercial verticals.

In the post-earnings call, CEO Alex Karp took a pointed aim at the sector’s practice of circular AI investments—where investors funnel capital into startups solely to drive spending back into their own cloud or hardware platforms. Karp emphasized that Palantir’s expansion is fully organic, based on direct contracts with defense, intelligence and commercial clients rather than engineered financial partnerships. He reiterated that the company has no intertwined economics with third-party vendors and is not co-investing in commodity products, calling Palantir’s growth metrics “pure” and urging investors to scrutinize the integrity of competitors’ reported figures.

Palantir’s U.S. government business surged 66% in Q4, positioning the company as a chief beneficiary of the federal government’s $25 billion AI-centric procurement plan unveiled for 2026. The Department of Defense and intelligence agencies have committed to expanding deployments of Palantir’s AIP and Foundry platforms for data analytics and mission planning. With a robust pipeline of multi-year contracts and backlog growth accelerating, management expects government revenue to drive a growing share of total sales, offsetting any near-term macroeconomic headwinds in commercial markets.