Palantir Grew 93% With a 47% GAAP Operating Margin

The two U.S. figures should not be added and treated as the whole company. They are major components of Palantir’s revenue, but international commercial and government revenue also contribute. The point is that growth was strong on both sides of the U.S. business, not that the U.S. mix explains every dollar of company revenue.^{1, 2}

Commercial growth is now moving faster than the government business

Palantir reported $764 million of U.S. commercial revenue in Q2, up 149% year over year. It also closed a record $2.13 billion of U.S. commercial total contract value, up 153%. That suggests the commercial business is not only growing off old contracts. Palantir is also signing a large amount of new committed business.¹

The government side remains large rather than fading into the background. U.S. government revenue reached $809 million, up 90%. That balance is part of what makes Palantir different from a typical enterprise software company. The growth story spans both commercial deployment and public-sector work.¹

The margin is more striking because it is GAAP

Palantir also reports adjusted profitability, but the 47% figure does not depend on removing stock-based compensation. The company’s GAAP operating income was $912 million on $1.935 billion of revenue. That makes the margin easier to compare with the operating statement itself and harder to dismiss as a purely adjusted metric.^{1, 2}

This is the opposite pattern from the capital-heavy growth we examined at CoreWeave, where revenue exploded while losses and infrastructure requirements remained large. Palantir sells software rather than GPU capacity, so the economics of serving incremental customers can look very different once the product and sales engine scale.

One quarter is not a new permanent baseline

The biggest caution is duration. Palantir’s Q2 growth rates are extraordinary, but extraordinary growth usually becomes harder to repeat as the revenue base expands. Contract timing, large government awards, customer concentration and the pace of new commercial deployments can all move quarterly results. A 47% margin in one quarter should be treated as evidence of current operating leverage, not a promise of future margins.²

Palantir’s Q2 is interesting because the usual growth-versus-profit trade-off barely appears in the headline numbers. The company is growing much faster than most large software businesses and reporting a very high GAAP operating margin at the same time. The harder question is whether that combination survives as the base gets bigger.