🚀 SpaceX: Growth Meets the Bill
Visualizing the massive AI CapEx ramp
Welcome to the Premium edition of How They Make Money.
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights.
In case you missed it:
🗓️ It’s peak earnings season!
This week, we’ll visualize more than 50 reports ranging from Airbnb to Zillow.
Today’s batch captures the mood of earnings season pretty well, with huge AI ambition, rising capital intensity, and a few quieter stories improving underneath.
Today at a glance:
🕵️ Palantir: Sovereign AI
🚀 SpaceX: Growth Meets the Bill
↗️ AMD: Data Center Takes Over
🛵 Grab: The Overhang Shrinks
🕵️ Palantir: Sovereign AI
Palantir Q2 revenue jumped 93% Y/Y to $1.94 billion ($130 million beat), marking the 12th consecutive quarter of acceleration. Adjusted EPS of $0.41 beat by $0.06. The Rule of 40 score climbed again to 155, with adjusted free cash flow reaching $1.22 billion at a 63% margin.
US revenue keeps pulling away.
💼 US Commercial: $764 million (+149% Y/Y, +28% Q/Q).
🪖 US Government: $809 million (+90% Y/Y, +18% Q/Q).
Total US revenue reached $1.57 billion, up 115% Y/Y and now representing 81% of Palantir’s business. International revenue grew a much slower 33% to $363 million, with CEO Alex Karp again dismissive of Europe: “The growth sucks.”
The pipeline behind the print looks even more bullish. Palantir closed 220 deals worth at least $1 million, including 73 above $10 million.
TCV (Total Contract Value): The total value of contracts signed during the quarter reached a record $2.13 billion in US Commercial, up 153% Y/Y.
RDV (Remaining Deal Value): Contracted revenue not yet recognized climbed 124% Y/Y (and a staggering 27% Q/Q) to $6.24 billion in US Commercial, giving Palantir an increasingly large backlog behind future growth.
Palantir’s new framing is “sovereign AI.” Management argues customers increasingly want AI without handing proprietary data, workflows, or competitive intelligence to frontier model providers. AIP (Palantir’s AI Platform) sits between companies and the models, letting customers swap LLMs while keeping their data and operational logic under their own control. Karp put it more bluntly: customers should not become “vassal states of the language labs.”
We discussed last quarter that tokens are the new coal. Models and tokens are becoming cheaper commodities. Palantir wants to own the governed operational layer where companies turn them into actual work.
Palantir raised FY26 revenue guidance by roughly $500 million to $8.15–$8.16 billion, implying 82% growth, versus 71% expected just three months ago. US Commercial is now expected to grow at least 134% to more than $3.42 billion. Adjusted free cash flow guidance increased to ~$4.6 billion (from ~$4.3 billion previously).
Bottom Line: The fundamental story somehow keeps getting stronger. Revenue growth accelerated, US Commercial is now 39% of the top line, and free cash flow margins have crossed 60%. The valuation is still extreme at nearly 80x FY26 EBITDA, but Palantir is doing something equally extreme: accelerating above 90% revenue growth at nearly $8 billion of annual revenue while simultaneously expanding margins.
🚀 SpaceX: Growth Meets the Bill
SpaceX’s first earnings report as a public company showed why investors are excited about the business and why the valuation remains difficult to digest.