r/investing
The more I follow Palantir Technologies, the less I think it's just an AI software company.
Palantir is evolving into an enterprise AI operating system via AIP, though high valuation and government reliance remain key risks.
- Evolving from a defense contractor into a comprehensive operating system for data-driven organizational decisions.
- Commercial side accelerating rapidly with AIP, focusing on real-world AI deployment rather than just selling models.
- Unique positioning in the AI ecosystem as the integration layer between foundation models and enterprise data/workflows.
- Extremely high expectations and premium valuation price in years of near-perfect execution.
- Significant reliance on government contracts exposes the business to political and ethical scrutiny.
A few years ago I would've described Palantir as a defense contractor with great software. Now I'm not so sure. It feels like it's evolving into an operating system for organizations that need to make decisions from massive amounts of data.
The government side is still a huge part of the story, and that's probably not changing anytime soon. Defense, intelligence, logistics, battlefield software... those businesses continue to grow. But what caught my attention recently is how much the commercial side has accelerated with AIP. U.S. commercial growth has been extraordinary, customer counts keep climbing, and management keeps talking less about selling AI models and more about helping companies actually deploy AI into real operations. That seems like an important distinction.
I also think Palantir occupies an unusual position in the AI ecosystem. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google build foundation models. Palantir isn't really trying to compete with them. Instead, it's trying to become the layer that helps governments and enterprises integrate those models with their own data, workflows and decision-making. If that's the future of enterprise AI, it's a pretty interesting place to sit.
The obvious risk is that expectations are now incredibly high. The company has been putting up exceptional numbers, but the stock is priced like investors expect years of near-perfect execution. There's also the reality that a meaningful portion of the business still depends on government contracts, and the company continues to attract political and ethical scrutiny because of the customers it serves.
Maybe that's why I find Palantir such a fascinating company. I'm less interested in whether it's expensive today than in whether it ends up becoming an indispensable enterprise AI platform or simply remains an exceptional defense software company.
Curious how others see the business.
Its helping ukraine win the war. Is it an evil company?
It's the architect of an advanced American surveillance state. Yes, it's evil.
So it’s creating an OS? This sounds like hype. What exactly are they developing? Why is it so nebulous if it’s so amazing. I’m genuinely curious.
They’re essentially a consultancy with a proprietary data platform. You hire them, they give you some embedded engineers, those engineers pipeline all your corporate data into their data platform and map it onto a structured graph, and once that graph is build you can build apps, dashboards, and workflows on top of it without rebuilding any data plumbing. And now they integrate AI agents into it or something.
From what I know about them, they’ve got a great sales pitch but the software isn’t anything special that a team of an internal Data Engineers/Data Scientists couldn’t do.
I am cheering its massive stock dip
You won’t get any feedback on Reddit. These same people would’ve told you not to buy when it was ten dollars a share.
It's a professional service company masquerading as SaaS originally and now AI. They just managed to implement the brilliant marketing technically of rebranding PS into 'Forward Deployed Engineers'. Anyone in the business knows this.
The obvious risk is that expectations are now incredibly high. The company has been putting up exceptional numbers, but the stock is priced like investors expect years of near-perfect execution. There's also the reality that a meaningful portion of the business still depends on government contracts, and the company continues to attract political and ethical scrutiny because of the customers it serves.
Their PE is 127, this is after the stock price dropped quite a bit. Their forward is still a bloated 54. No shit they better be executing with perfection. I would expect more than perfect if I was invested in this bloated mess. At least Tesla has hype, wtf is the point of this company? just the "evil overlord AI" angle?
If you think your investment has any impact on the trajectory of PLTR then you are delusional. I'll take money from anywhere, anyone, and use it to do good.
Or maybe you're the one arguing in bad faith?
If you had done your DD, you'd know that PLTR doesn't work on its own. There's a reason why the government also works with other companies besides PLTR. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, LLM companies, etc.
I don't see you people crying about Satya Nadella being evil and that all companies should stop using windows and azure.
"You people" as if Reddit is some monolith of opinion. I do have moral issues with Amazon, MSFT, Oracle, and the like. It's difficult to stay away from problematic companies but avoiding such an obviously evil company like Palantir is more doable.
So you're saying you only hate on PLTR because it doesn't inconvenience you as much. Selectively hating on a company while ignoring the rest that would inconvenience your lifestyle. You know you are admitting to being a hypocrite, right?
I don't think this argument is very productive so I'll stop here but go ahead and get in the last word. I'm sure you'll have something you think is very clever.
Palantir is more problematic than a company like MSFT. Also it's incredibly difficult to avoid companies that own so many core technologies. That's just a reality of life. None of us are living perfect lives but we should try and do our best.
You have to learn to speak the code they use:
“Obviously evil” to them just means “run by a conservative”.