Hiding inside Palantir’s skyrocketing quarter is a foreboding signal

Palantir delivered such a huge third-quarter earnings report on Monday that its press release even bragged that the numbers were “crushing consensus expectations.”

Yet, retail investors were lukewarm on the company on Tuesday, with the stock trading slightly down. That’s because Palantir’s enterprise sales, its big growth area, showed signs of slowing.

The clincher was that Palantir’s U.S. commercial revenue surpassed U.S. government revenue for the first time ever. The company reported $984 million in commercial contracts (up 148% from the year-ago quarter), versus $953 million in U.S. government revenue.

The reason for all this love from enterprises? They are signing up for the company’s AI software that can run frontier models and custom-train open-weight models securely, without sharing any of their data and business processes with outside AI labs. Plus, Palantir has always offered what is today known as “forward-deployed” software engineering, which helps customers customize its wares.

However, Palantir also revealed a less-than-rosy signal: Even as enterprises are moving faster than ever., they are often signing short-term trials.

“What Ryan and I are seeing on the front line and commercial is this much quicker interaction, much quicker to deployment, shorter duration of the contract but then an ability to expand that contract dramatically,” CEO Alex Karp (pictured above) told Wall Street analysts on the quarterly conference call.

Palantir is experiencing one of the unique phenomena of AI in the enterprise right now. Corporations are willing to quickly try AI software without their typical bureaucracy, but they are also more willing to cancel contracts.

Karp used one off-color metaphor after another to describe how unconcerned he was about holding onto his enterprise business.

“We’ve gone from being the most attractive person in the physics department to being the captain of the football team, kind of thing,” he said describing the influx of prospective corporate customers were flowing in. “Conversely, you know, once you go Palantir, you don’t go back, and that’s just that’s how it is, and you see it in our numbers.”

The numbers don’t yet confirm Palantir’s long-term success. While the company closed a hefty $1.46 billion of total contract value from U.S. enterprises in the quarter, that’s actually a decline from its record-setting $2.13 billion of enterprise TCV in the previous quarter. That suggests decelerating sales, at least last quarter.

The next earnings will show if Palantir has solidified its role as a rising U.S. enterprise AI provider. Historically, many enterprises sign their biggest tech purchases in the final quarter of the year. Certainly Karp and team are confident. They increased guidance for U.S. commercial revenue to be “in excess of $3.559 billion, representing a growth rate of at least 143%.”