Emerging juggernaut
While Nvidia (NVDA) and other Magnificent 7 members have grabbed headlines over the past year, one AI player has stood ahead of the pack in terms of sheer returns. Palantir (PLTR) is up a whopping 514% in the last 12 months, and just took its next leg up in AH trading on Monday to top the $100 level for the first time. Stellar earnings from the AI software analytics company were responsible for the nearly 23% pop, while it projected bumper numbers for 2025 amid accelerating AI adoption.
You called it! Back in September 2024, subscribers to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Breakfast were asked to name the most unknown stock in the market poised for outsized returns. Palantir was the most popular reply - and that was when the stock was trading at $37. In the first week of the new year, WSB followed up with a survey on the best AI stock to watch in 2025 - and Palantir was the top favorite again, as it changed hands at $70. At those levels, investors who bought in would have seen gains of 178% and 47%, respectively, over the span of just months or weeks.
Palantir (PLTR) also recently joined both the S&P 500 (SP500) and Nasdaq 100 (NDX), giving it exposure to broader market ETFs and products. Meanwhile, a deepening relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense resulted in government sales exploding 45% to $343M in the latest quarter, while U.S. commercial revenue skyrocketed 64% to $214M. Palantir's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which helps companies integrate complex AI models for analytics and insights, has played a pivotal role in inking the new contracts, while efficiency initiatives and likely increases in defense spending by the Trump administration should ring the register for the foreseeable future.
"With the proliferation of AI models, the raw AI labor supply is exploding," Chief Revenue Officer Ryan Taylor said on the earnings call. "While everyone else is focused on the model supply side, we're transforming AI into a measurable stream of high-value finished goods and services. The result, the rapid emergence of quantified exceptionalism for organizations able to unlock the potential of these commoditized models through AIP."
More from the C-Suite: "We are still in the earliest stages, the beginning of the first act, of a revolution that will play out over years and decades," CEO Alex Karp wrote in a letter to shareholders. "This is not an incremental advance or marginal acceleration of our business. This is a new phase. The business we have built has now developed its own internal momentum and strength, its own interior life and forms of untamed organic growth, with the output that we are seeing far surpassing what we are investing. A software juggernaut has indeed emerged."
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