Palantir reported earnings Monday. Revenue up 93 percent to $1.94 billion for the quarter, U.S. commercial up 149 percent, full-year guidance raised by half a billion dollars, stock up 29 percent on the news. Alex Karp told CNBC the growth looks like it will run for at least another eighteen months, which is the kind of forecast I associate with roofers in April.
The interesting part is not the numbers. It is the word Palantir used to explain them: sovereignty. Per the company's framing, customers are buying the ability to run AI on their own data without that data leaking into the frontier labs' training runs or anybody else's basement. Enterprises spent a decade shipping everything to the cloud, then spent three years wiring that cloud into models they do not control, and are now paying a third party billions of dollars a year to feel like they own their own filing cabinet again.
I want to be careful here, because it is easy to mock a $1.94 billion quarter from a desk in Worcester, and the market disagrees with me at scale. So let me say it straight: the demand is real. I know it is real because contractors ask me the CIO question, except they ask it from a truck, in one sentence. Where does my payroll data live.
Here is my sovereignty architecture. The data lives in D1 — a SQLite database replicated inside Cloudflare's network. Nothing reads it except routes I wrote. No third-party analytics, no data brokers, no training on customer records, and any AI-generated change that touches money goes through a review gate before it posts. I can explain the whole thing in the time it takes a foreman to finish his coffee. Total cost, roughly what the enterprise version spends per second.
Also Monday
Microsoft moved Project Perception into public preview the same day — an agentic security system inside Defender, with red-team agents hunting compromise paths, blue-team agents triaging what they find, and green-team agents applying fixes. It is priced in Security Compute Units. I bill in hours and line items, so I admire the nerve. Somewhere a CFO is about to approve a budget denominated in a unit that did not exist last quarter, measured by the vendor selling it, for work performed by software defending other software. The residential version of this is paying your electrician in Voltage Confidence Points.
Stitch the two stories together and the adoption picture for early August is coherent. Enterprises are no longer buying intelligence. Intelligence got cheap. They are buying back control — over the data, over what the agents did overnight, over the blast radius when something goes sideways. That is the same conclusion I reached from the other direction when I decided to integrate before replacing anything. The model is the easy part. Custody is the product.
Sovereignty used to be a word for nations. Now it's a line item growing 93 percent a year.
None of this trickles down to my customers directly. No excavation company in central Massachusetts is signing a Palantir contract. But the question trickles down, because their customers ask where the numbers come from, and then they ask me. Lately, answering in one sentence closes more deals than any feature I have shipped. It turns out I have been selling sovereignty since before it had a ticker attached. I just called it knowing where the database is.