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By Christine Ji and Britney Nguyen

The software company is boosting its outlook, and its CEO is cheering gains for retail investors

Palantir posted third-quarter results on Monday.

Palantir Technologies Inc. broke records once again with its third-quarter earnings as the company’s artificial-intelligence offerings drove aggressive business growth, but the stock fell in after-hours trading.

Palantir (PLTR) on Monday posted its best-ever results, reporting $1.18 billion in revenue and adjusted earnings of 21 cents per share for the quarter that ended Sept. 30. The results surpassed Wall Street expectations – analysts polled by FactSet had been anticipating $1.1 billion and 17 cents, respectively.

The company raised its full-year guidance as a result of its momentum. Palantir now anticipates around $4.40 billion in revenues for the 2025 fiscal year, up from the $4.14 billion to $4.15 billion the company had guided for in the second quarter.

Overall revenue grew 63% year over year, with much of the growth being driven by Palantir’s biggest segment, U.S. commercial, which saw sales rise by 121% year over year. Ryan Taylor, Palantir’s chief revenue and legal officer, told MarketWatch that Palantir is prioritizing the domestic market, which now comprises 75% of the business’s total revenue.

The stock initially climbed 7% in Monday’s extended session, but soon gave up those gains, and ended down 4.3%.

“As we have seen thus far this earnings season, earnings beats aren’t necessarily being rewarded owing to extended positioning and lofty expectations already baked into price,” Jake Behan, head of capital markets at Direxion, said in a note. “At this valuation, even great numbers don’t move the needle. The bar is sky high and not an easy one to clear, even for Palantir.”

The latest quarter was the fourth in a row in which Palantir’s U.S. commercial business was larger than its U.S. government segment, David Glazer, Palantir’s chief financial officer and treasurer, told MarketWatch.

Meanwhile, Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform, or AIP, continues to see strong demand. Taylor said that’s because it’s “the only platform delivering transformational impact in this market.”

Palantir has been a controversial name on Wall Street due to its rich valuation – the stock trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 253 times, according to FactSet – and its reliance on government contracts. Only 24% of the analysts covering Palantir polled by FactSet assign the stock a buy or buy-equivalent rating. But what Palantir lacks in institutional support, it makes up for with its fervent retail following, which CEO Alex Karp emphasized as a key part of what distinguishes Palantir from other software businesses.

“People who are most excited about our results in America now are average Americans,” Karp told MarketWatch.

In a shareholder letter, he said Palantir “has made it possible for retail investors to achieve rates of return previously limited to the most successful venture capitalists in Palo Alto.” Shares closed Monday above $207, after opening at $10 when the company conducted its 2020 direct listing.

The company’s earnings beat sends a strong message of continuing demand for Palantir’s products. Prior to the earnings report, Citi analyst Tyler Radke questioned whether Palantir could surpass the high expectations set by last quarter’s results, which saw the company crossing $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time.

Read: Here’s Palantir’s ‘secret sauce,’ which these analysts say can boost the stock even more

-Christine Ji -Britney Nguyen

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  11-03-25 2016ET
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China has increased subsidies that cut energy bills by up to half for some of the country’s largest data centres, as Beijing steps up efforts to boost its domestic chips industry and compete with the US.

Local governments have beefed up incentives to help Chinese tech giants such as ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent, which have been hit with higher electricity costs following Beijing’s ban on purchasing Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips, according to people familiar with the matter.

They added that the new subsidies come after several tech groups complained to regulators about the increased costs of using domestic semiconductors from companies such as Huawei and Cambricon, most of which are less energy-efficient than Nvidia’s.

Local governments in data centre-heavy provinces such as Gansu, Guizhou and Inner Mongolia have responded by offering subsidies that slash big data centres’ electricity bills by as much as 50 per cent, provided that they are powered by domestic chips.

Data centres using chips from foreign vendors such as Nvidia are not qualified for such entitlements, the people said.

The move is a further sign of how China is incentivising its tech companies to break their reliance on Nvidia and boost the country’s homegrown semiconductor industry so it can compete in an AI race against the US.

Electricity required to generate the same amount of tokens — units of compute power — from the current generation of Chinese chips is about 30 to 50 per cent higher than Nvidia’s H20, according to experts.

Huawei, China’s leading chipmaker, has sought to overcome the weaker single-chip computing performance of its flagship Ascend 910C chip by combining them into larger clusters, which has added to the operating electricity costs.

While tech companies typically lease compute power from third-party data centre operators, they still need to build a significant amount themselves to meet surging demand from AI-driven businesses.

Despite the higher energy costs related to using domestic chips, China’s more centralised grid network still provides cheaper and greener electricity than the US with no near-term shortage.

China’s energy-rich remote provinces such as Gansu, Guizhou and Inner Mongolia have become hotspots for data centre clusters.

To attract the biggest projects, these local governments have already been competing to offer some energy subsidies as well as cash incentives.

Some of these are enough to cover a data centre’s operating cost for about a year, said a person with knowledge of the matter.

Unit costs of industrial electricity in these provinces are about 30 per cent cheaper than those from the more developed coastal areas of eastern China. With the new subsidies, they will be cut further to about 0.4 yuan, or 5.6 cents, per kWh.

This compares with the average industrial electricity cost of about 9.1 cents per kWh in the US, according to August data published by the US Energy Information Administration.

Electricity prices vary significantly in different US states due to fragmented grid networks, while US tech groups such as Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI are also building their own generators near their data centre clusters in order to lower energy costs.

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent did not respond to requests for comment.

The local governments of Guizhou, Gansu, Inner Mongolia and China’s National Development and Reform Commission did not respond to requests for comment.

Additional contributions from Cheng Leng in Beijing