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 unpack how Palantir is turning AI’s commoditized cognition into a competitive advantage.
Highlights
00:03 — One of the big stories of 2026 has been the ongoing rise of Palantir, a true unicorn at 23 years old, but still a unicorn in the enterprise software business and its incredible growth. In Q4, its revenue is up 70% to $1.4 billion, and it’s projecting 61% growth for all of calendar 2026. So this was not an aberration or a flash in the pan.
01:49 — CEO Alexander Karp says, we at Palantir, because of the nature of the work we’re doing with our customers, we’ve gone beyond software in the products we make. It’s not just software. He calls them implementation orchestration machines. Does it unlock things? Can we get this up and running quickly and get them driving business outcomes as quickly as possible?
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02:35 — The haves in the AI Revolution are going to be the workers who are using these tools, who gain the expertise of what is possible with these tools. Whether that’s in a factory, in manufacturing and logistics, or shipping, or software development, or whatever type of industry, certainly the military in the public sector, which is such a big part of Palantir’s business.
03:18 — Palantir’s job is not to deliver the best product or great products. Palantir’s job is to deliver magical outcomes to customers. And Karp said too often, I think the software industry gets focused on great products. That mindset can get you a little bit detached from what it is that the customer wants and needs and expects.
04:30 — Large language models have done a phenomenal job in the commoditization of cognition. That’s wonderful. That’s a big step forward. The real power, the real advantage, and what Palantir is focused on is this: how do you take that commoditization of cognition and allow customers to leverage that to do things they were never able to do before, to gain the full capabilities of AI.
