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The Briefing
Palantir is truly the Nvidia of AI software.͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­
Aug 3, 2026

The Briefing

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Palantir is truly the Nvidia of AI software. On Monday, the company delivered another rip-roaring quarterly result, showing revenue up a blistering 93%, well ahead of what it had projected. The company has accelerated revenue growth every quarter for three years, from a 13% rate of expansion in the second quarter of 2023. In that time, Palantir’s top line has increased from $533 million a quarter to $1.9 billion. Palantir stock rose 11% in after-hours trading.

Its growth over the past three years isn’t quite as dazzling as that of Nvidia—whose stranglehold on the AI chip market lifted revenue to $216 billion in its most recent fiscal year from $27 billion three years earlier—but it’s pretty stunning nevertheless. What makes this particularly notable is that Palantir doesn’t develop its own large language models. It has figured out how to make a massive amount of money—Palantir’s operations generated $2.1 billion in cash in the first half of 2026, while capital expenditures were only $22 million—from software that works on top of other companies’ AI. 

That’s something every other software company is aiming to do. Palantir is far ahead of the rest. As my colleague Laura Bratton described, Palantir offers “end-to-end software, helping customers link and organize data they store in systems such as Snowflake, Salesforce and SAP.” It develops AI agents and other apps to utilize that data, and its consultants help clients make AI work for them.

It likely helps that co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp is an iconoclastic showman whose proselytizing about the dangers posed by AI firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI doubles as marketing for Palantir’s services. Repeating a message he has lately sounded loudly, including on CNBC a month ago, he asserted in a letter accompanying earnings that “every organization in the world is awakening to the risks of handing the creators of the language models the keys to their institutions,” referring to the organizations’ data, which he says AI models aim to capture. 

His message seems hyperbolic, but no matter—it’s helping Palantir thrive.

Is Snap bouncing back? Maybe. The social media service popular with teens reported 19% higher revenues for the second quarter, sending the long-battered stock up 10% in after-hours trading. 

But let’s not get too excited. Most of the growth came from Snap’s subscriptions and other revenue, which rocketed 85% to $316 million, or about 20% of the total. Advertising showed signs of life—it rose 9%, which is better than the 2.7% reported in the first quarter. But it’s well below what other digital media firms are reporting.

The bigger worry is that Snap’s engine, its user base, is still not growing where it matters most—the U.S. and Europe. The company’s North American daily active users stayed flat compared with the first quarter at 92 million (and that user count is 7% below where it was 12 months earlier). The European DAU count picked up to 98 million, compared with 97 million in the first quarter, but that’s still down 2% from a year ago. Snap’s user growth is coming mostly from other parts of the world, which are much smaller sources of revenue.

Until Snap can revive user growth in the U.S. in particular, its future will be clouded.

• Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group made its new flagship model, Qwen3.8-Max, widely available on Monday through application programming interfaces at lower prices than its Chinese competitor Moonshot AI’s popular Kimi K3 model. Alibaba will also make the open-source model available for download next week.

• Shares of Microsoft closed 0.8% higher than where they finished in 2025, the first time all year the stock has been in the black, Koyfin data shows. Meanwhile, Amazon closed Monday with a market capitalization above $3 trillion for the first time ever.

Check out today’s episode of TITV where we look at the latest on the Trump administration’s AI oversight efforts.

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