Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I examine why Google Cloud and Palantir have become the fastest-growing companies in enterprise AI.
Highlights
00:01 — Now that we are more than halfway through the year, we’ve got Q2 earnings season coming up, and a couple that I’m looking for in particular are Google Cloud and Palantir because their growth rates have been so much above the norm. I think what we see in those growth rates and in the numbers behind those is a reflection of what customers really want from AI and the cloud here in the AI revolution.
00:52 — Let’s look at numbers for Google Cloud, the number one company on the Cloud Wars Top 10. Palantir is number five. For Google Cloud, in the quarter ended a few months ago, March 31, its growth rate was 63%. Its revenue was $20 billion. Q4: 48%, $17.7 billion. Going back to Q3: 34%, Q2: 32%, and Q1: 28%. So we see, for the last five quarters, Google Cloud has soared over the last couple of quarters
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01:57 — Now let’s look at Palantir with those same five quarters, going back to Q1 of 2025, and up through Q1 of this year. So, most recently, 85% growth rate with over $1.6 billion in revenue, 70% before that, 63% before that, 48%, 39%. So in both cases, we see the company, even as its revenue base gets bigger, growing much, much faster moving forward.
03:22 — Palantir is 24 years old. This is not a startup company, although it’s just sort of burst onto the scene. I wonder if, in some ways, Palantir’s technology was out ahead of where the market was. But now that the AI boom has swept the world, Palantir’s technologies are now suitable for companies of any size to help take what they have and use that as a foundation to build into the future.
04:37 — Innovation in going to market, as well as in technology, means some new approaches to things. I think particularly Google Cloud here has been an extraordinary example of this. And I refer in this article to their recent disclosure that while OpenAI and Anthropic, AWS, and Microsoft are all launching deployment units to pull off these big AI projects, Google Cloud is relying 100% on its ecosystem.
05:11 — I’ll be eager to see how these companies do in Q2, and we’ll follow up with those and the other Cloud Wars Top 10 companies on how they’ve done in calendar Q2. But I really take my hat off to Google Cloud and Palantir because, in this very intense time, with an enormous market and everybody going after it, their growth rates are soaring.
