Palantir Made $1.94B Helping Trump Deport People. Stocks Are Up.

The Numbers That Made Wall Street Blush

According to The Guardian, Palantir's overall revenue grew 93% year over year in the second quarter, blowing past the $1.8 billion analysts expected. CEO Alex Karp described it in the least humble terms available to a human being: "This quarter was otherworldly."

He is not wrong, technically. A 93% year-over-year revenue jump is not something you see outside of either a rocket ship startup or a company that has found a very large and very reliable customer. Palantir has found both, and one of them is the United States federal government.

US government contracts alone brought in $809 million, up 90% year over year, per The Guardian. Let that sink in for a second. The government slice of Palantir's business nearly doubled in a single year. That is not organic growth. That is a company that has made itself indispensable to an administration with a very specific and very aggressive set of priorities.

The company then raised its full-year revenue outlook from a previous estimate of roughly $7.65 billion to $8.15 billion. For context, that is a mid-year revision of half a billion dollars upward. These are not the numbers of a company that's doing fine. These are the numbers of a company that is eating.

What Exactly Is Being Bought Here

Palantir does not just sell software. It sells the infrastructure of surveillance and targeting at industrial scale. The company's analytics platforms are used by ICE, CBP, and other agencies deeply embedded in the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, which the company itself has faced growing opposition over, as The Guardian notes.

So when you see that $809 million government revenue figure, you are looking at the price tag on a significant chunk of the machinery being used to identify, track, and remove people from the country. This is not speculation. Palantir's involvement in immigration enforcement is documented, litigated, and protested. The company has not distanced itself from any of it.

Karp, for his part, spent time on the earnings call taking shots at OpenAI and Anthropic, arguing that Palantir respects its partners' data sovereignty while the big AI labs hoover up everything they can find to train their models. "The models have grown and thrived by essentially ingesting the entire written work product of our civilization," he wrote in his shareholder letter. Palantir, he argued, would never enter into a "parasitic relationship" with its partners.

Palantir's relationship with the federal government is, by all appearances, extremely consensual. The government wants mass deportation infrastructure. Palantir provides it. Everyone goes home happy, except for the people being deported.

The Analysts Are Cautiously Thrilled, With One Big Asterisk

Not everyone on Wall Street is ready to pop champagne. Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne told The Guardian that Palantir has "been the clearest counter-example to the claim that enterprise AI doesn't scale past pilots," which is analyst-speak for: okay fine, this actually works, we were wrong to doubt it.

But Bourne flagged the same question that has dogged Palantir's stock all year: what happens when the AI that Palantir wraps its business around gets good enough to cut out the middleware? "What it doesn't settle is whether AI eventually collapses the software layer Palantir occupies," Bourne said. That's the sword hanging over every analytics company right now, and it has already caused industry-wide share price drops earlier this year.

For now, though, Palantir has an answer to that concern, and the answer is: extremely locked-in government clients who cannot easily rip out mission-critical infrastructure regardless of what the AI market does. When your customer is an administration that has built its signature domestic policy around your product, you have pricing power. You have staying power. You have, as Karp might put it, an otherworldly quarter.

What Comes Next: Even More Money

Palantir is projecting $2.16 billion in revenue for Q3, per The Guardian. The company's US commercial revenue, separate from government contracts, grew 149% year over year. That is the kind of number that gets repeated at investor conferences until it becomes legend.

The company has guided full-year revenue to between $8.15 billion and $8.158 billion, up from its previous estimate of $7.65 billion to $7.66 billion. They revised their own already-optimistic projections upward by roughly $500 million in a single quarter.

Karp is not projecting any slowdown. He is projecting more. The administration he serves is not projecting any slowdown either. If anything, the second term has been more aggressive on immigration enforcement than the first, and there is no obvious ceiling in sight on either the policy ambition or the budget to execute it.