Palantir stock: what is actually going on

Palantir is one of the most argued-about stocks in the market, and 2026 has given both sides plenty of material. The share price is almost exactly where it started the year, but it got there by falling more than 40% and then nearly doubling. This page is our running explanation of what the business actually is, what the last reported quarter showed, and what is moving the stock now. Every figure comes from Palantir's own filings and releases or from exchange data, with the date attached.

Where the money comes from

Palantir sells software platforms: Gotham for defense and intelligence work, Foundry for commercial and industrial operations, Apollo for deploying and updating software across environments, and AIP, its artificial intelligence platform, layered on top. Customers pay for subscriptions, on-premises licenses with ongoing maintenance, and professional services.

The company reports two segments. In the quarter ended June 30, 2026, on total revenue of $1.935 billion:

• Government: $990.0 million, roughly 51% of revenue, with a 71% contribution margin.
• Commercial: $945.4 million, roughly 49%, with a 78% contribution margin.

Geographically the business has become steadily more American. The United States was $1.573 billion, or 81% of revenue, in the quarter, up from 73% a year earlier. The rest of the world was $362.4 million, or 19%. Palantir says no other single country reached 10% of revenue.

Inside the US number, the fastest growing piece is US commercial: $764 million in the quarter, up 149% from a year earlier. US government revenue was $809 million, up 90%.

The share price and the size of the company

Palantir closed at $177.64 on Friday, September 18, 2026, up 0.79% from $176.24, on volume of about 39.3 million shares, according to Nasdaq data we pulled on September 19. Market value is roughly $427 billion. The 52-week range is $106.37 to $207.52. Palantir pays no dividend.

The path this year is the story. The stock closed 2025 at $177.75, fell to a 2026 low of $107.27 on June 25, and has since climbed about 66% off that low. It sits 0.1% below where it began the year, and about 14% below the top of its 52-week range. The single biggest day was August 4, the session after second-quarter results, when the stock rose 29% from $125.65 to $162.66.

One consequence of that recovery: on the company's own raised full-year guidance of $8.150 billion to $8.158 billion in revenue, the current market value works out to roughly 52 times this year's sales. That multiple is the whole debate in one number.

The last reported quarter

Palantir reported second-quarter 2026 results on August 3, 2026. The headline figures:

• Revenue: $1.935 billion, up 93% from a year earlier and up 19% from the prior quarter.
• GAAP income from operations: $912.0 million, a 47% margin. Adjusted income from operations was $1.194 billion, a 62% margin.
• GAAP net income: $1.062 billion, a 55% margin. GAAP and adjusted earnings per diluted share were both $0.41.
• Cash from operations: $1.216 billion. Adjusted free cash flow was $1.220 billion, a 63% margin.
• Deals: 220 deals of at least $1 million, 98 of at least $5 million and 73 of at least $10 million. Total closed contract value was $3.373 billion, up 49%, including $2.132 billion of US commercial contract value, up 153%.
• Balance sheet: $9.2 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term US Treasury securities.
• Guidance: third-quarter revenue of $2.160 billion to $2.164 billion, full-year revenue raised to $8.150 billion to $8.158 billion, full-year adjusted free cash flow raised to $4.5 billion to $4.7 billion, and GAAP operating income and net income expected in every quarter of the year.

Chief executive Alex Karp framed it this way in the release: "Demand for AI sovereignty has now been unleashed. And Palantir is the only company that has demonstrated it can transform tokens into actual economic value."

What is driving the stock right now

1. The August repricing has not been tested yet. The stock's whole 2026 recovery rests on one quarter. The next check is third-quarter results, where the company has guided to $2.16 billion. Palantir had not published a date for that report as of September 19, 2026.

2. "Sovereign AI" is becoming a concrete product, not just a slogan. On September 10, NVIDIA published a technical account of a supply chain command center built on Palantir Foundry with NVIDIA's cuOpt optimizer and a 30-billion-parameter Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model fine-tuned on allocation decisions. The first deployment is inside NVIDIA's own supply chain. For Palantir the significance is the pattern: the model runs inside the customer's environment, on the customer's data, which is exactly what the company sells.

3. Data control is turning into a competitive edge. The Information reported in mid-September, as summarized by PYMNTS, that Palantir will not offer Anthropic's latest model through its own platform without an irrevocable zero-data-retention guarantee, and that NVIDIA and Booz Allen Hamilton have placed similar limits on outside models for sensitive work. Anthropic has since introduced enterprise safeguards letting customers keep retained data in their own cloud storage under their own keys. Whatever the outcome, enterprises worrying about where their data goes is the demand Palantir is built to capture.

4. Commercial land-and-expand keeps producing recognizable names. WIRED reported in mid-September that Chipotle is piloting a food safety platform built on Foundry that combines health department inspection scores, pest incidents and employee illnesses to rank the risk at individual restaurants. Chipotle's chief corporate affairs and food safety officer, Laurie Schalow, confirmed the pilot, saying the platform "brings important information together so the company can identify trends, prioritize follow-up and make more proactive decisions," according to Restaurant Technology News. Chipotle has not said how many restaurants are involved.

The bear case, stated fairly

Most of the strongest bearish points are in Palantir's own filings.

The multiple. At roughly 52 times guided 2026 revenue, the stock prices in years of compounding at close to current rates. Growth of 93% will not continue indefinitely; the company's own third-quarter guide implies a step down in sequential growth from 19% to about 12%.

Concentration. Accounts receivable were $1.5 billion at June 30, up from $1.0 billion at the end of 2025, and the 10-Q discloses that a single customer, identified only as Customer I, was 27% of total receivables, up from 25%. Revenue is also increasingly dependent on one country: Palantir's own risk disclosure notes that if the US share of revenue stays at current levels or rises, the business becomes more exposed to conditions there.

Visibility is shorter than the growth rate suggests. Remaining performance obligations, the contracted revenue not yet recognized, were $4.9 billion at June 30, less than a year of revenue at the current run rate, and Palantir notes that many customers can terminate for convenience with less than twelve months' notice. That is one reason the company points investors to contract value and remaining deal value instead.

Dilution and fixed costs. Stock-based compensation was $265.2 million in the quarter, about 14% of revenue, up from $160.0 million a year earlier. Separately, Palantir amended a cloud hosting agreement in March 2026 committing it to spend at least $5.6 billion over ten contract years through February 2036, with annual minimums of $268 million to $979 million. That is a real fixed obligation against revenue that is not yet contracted.

Control. The multiple share class structure, including Class F shares, leaves founders effectively controlling stockholder votes. Palantir disclosed that excluding Class F voting power, the founders and their affiliates held shares carrying about 22% of voting power as of July 27, 2026.

What we are watching

• Third-quarter results. No date announced as of September 19, 2026. Watch revenue against the $2.160 billion to $2.164 billion guide, and whether US commercial growth holds near triple digits.
• US commercial remaining deal value, which was $6.238 billion at June 30, up 124% from a year earlier. This is the cleanest forward indicator the company gives.
• Receivables and Customer I. Whether the receivable balance keeps growing faster than revenue and whether that one customer's share keeps climbing.
• Government budgets. Just over half of revenue is government work, so appropriations and defense procurement timing matter directly.
• Rates. Long-duration, high-multiple software is the most rate-sensitive part of the market. The Fed has just moved policy to 3.75% to 4%. See our coverage of the September decision and live levels on the markets page.

Sources: Palantir second-quarter 2026 results release, August 3, 2026; Palantir Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026; Nasdaq quote, summary and historical price data for PLTR retrieved September 19, 2026; NVIDIA technical blog, September 10, 2026; The Information via PYMNTS; WIRED via Restaurant Technology News. Percentage moves in the share price are calculated from the Nasdaq closing prices cited. This page is updated as the numbers change. This is market information, not investment advice.