Palantir’s fourth-quarter earnings call turned into a geopolitical rant, with CEO Alexander Karp blasting Canada and much of Europe for falling behind in the AI race, casting the global economy as a looming conflict between the “AI haves” and the “have-nots.”
Palantir reports fourth-quarter revenue rose 70% year-over-year to $1.407 billion, Rule of 40 Karp, who had a score of 127, believes the company’s performance exposes a widening gap between countries and institutions willing to reform themselves around advanced AI software, and those tinkering around the edges.
Karp pointed out that Palantir’s U.S. business grew 93% year over year in the fourth quarter and now accounts for 77% of total revenue. He asked hypothetically: “What does such an inflated number mean?” He argued that Palantir is “doing things differently than any other company,” which is actually bad news because it raises another question: “This is obviously important to the world. What does this mean to the world?”
Karp as Davos Man 2.0
echo Trump administration rhetoric At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, where Karp was a speaker, the Palantir CEO was harshly critical of companies that fail to adopt artificial intelligence. “Unfortunately, we’re also seeing a real hesitancy to adopt these types of products in Western countries outside of the U.S., and the two places leading the way are China and the U.S.,” he said. “What we’re seeing in the U.S. is so different. So, those who are not adopting this approach, those who are not adopting this approach, want to have a catch-up function.” Good luck, he seemed to say, asserting that Palantir’s earnings are a “breakout function,” which means “the way we look at value clearly doesn’t matter anymore.”
The value created by Palantir is “so large and so disproportionate that you can create a company that seems to be exploding in terms of growth and the quality of growth.” He then singled out Palantir for saying that its advanced AI platform has seen widespread adoption in parts of the Middle East and China, but “a lack of adoption in Canada, the Nordics and across Europe.” Look at France, he said, which is one of the countries that has “the clearest understanding of this problem.” France has no choice to solve this adoption problem and is forced to keep signing new agreements with Palantir. December 2025, France Renew three-year contract Cooperation with French intelligence.
“One of the things you see in Northern Europe, Canada and elsewhere is a real pressure to move to the left or to the right politically,” Karp said. “Because when you don’t have answers to questions, the way you approach that problem is to create meaningless ideologies and try to implement them.”
To be sure, Karp’s framework ignores that Palantir itself has chosen to focus its production capacity in the United States and “doesn’t have enough bandwidth” to do more complex international work. It also dismissed legitimate arguments for slower or more selective adoption: regulatory regimes in Europe and Canada place greater emphasis on privacy, civil liberties and supplier diversity, and many governments prefer sovereign or domestic solutions in critical infrastructure. It also sees Palantir’s success in the uniquely favorable U.S. defense market as widespread evidence that countries like Canada and Europe are failing in AI simply because they haven’t bought his platform at scale. Different jurisdictions have the power to pursue AI on their own timelines, with their own safeguards and vendor mixes.
Wall Street analysts are leaning toward Karp’s version of events because they are aligned on this popular stock. Bank of America For example, the study argued that Palantir’s profit blowout constitutes a “warning for slow adaptors” in the AI field: “The clock is ticking.” BofA writes that there’s exponential growth here as Palantir takes intentional action in how it goes to market, develops its products and becomes a driver of AI decisions. The analysts added that if companies really want to become “artificial intelligence companies,” they need to deliver real results. Given the market’s “continued instability” in its relationship with artificial intelligence companies, Bank of America believes the series of results solidify Palantir’s position “as a company that will survive and thrive amid disruption.”
rich and poor
Inside the company, Karp and President Shyam Sankar described a similar division between the “haves” and “have-nots” in AI. Chief revenue officer Ryan Taylor said some customers are now signing initial agreements for $80 million to $96 million in a matter of months and rapidly expanding usage, citing examples of utility and energy customers whose annual contract values will quadruple or quintuple by 2025. Taylor describes these customers as “AI-native enterprises” that start with large commitments and quickly scale to thousands of users and hundreds of use cases.
“Our customers are not just trying out AI temporarily, they are using it at scale,” Taylor said, adding that Palantir’s top 20 customers now generated an average of $94 million in trailing 12-month revenue per customer, up 45% year over year. Karp believes that these companies are “defining the future of their industries,” while those still dabbling in pilots — “companies without AI” — are “fighting for survival now.”
Bank of America noted how embedded Palantir is in the enterprise space, with earnings call mentions expanding, with 17 unique mentions in the quarter, up from 7 a year ago, and a total of 38 mentions, up from 25 in the same period last year, a new high.
Karp’s comments come as Palantir ramps up its role as a major supplier of artificial intelligence systems to the U.S. government and defense sectors. The company highlighted U.S. Navy contracts worth up to $448 million to modernize the shipbuilding supply chain and described its “Ship Operating System” and “Warp Speed” industrial tools as part of a broader push to reindustrialize U.S. defense manufacturing. Usage of Palantir’s Maven defense AI platform, which supports synchronized real-world military events and is being rolled out to more combat commands and edge environments, is at an “all-time high,” Sankar said.
For now, Palantir’s capacity constraints and surging U.S. demand leave Karp with little incentive to appease discontent overseas. He said the company “really doesn’t have the capacity to do anything difficult outside the U.S.” and questioned whether the European procurement system has enough “capacity” to buy the “best product” if that means favoring U.S. suppliers over domestic champions.
At times, Kapp sounded almost regretful about his European game. “It’s extremely dangerous to believe you can build a company without this,” Karp said of orchestrated production-grade AI systems. “Even if you get to even half that level, your performance becomes a real issue for tech companies and the country. Can we produce a company that produces one quarter of the year?”