Palantir’s fourth-quarter earnings call turned into a geopolitical broadside as CEO Alex Karp blasted Canada and much of Europe for falling behind in the artificial intelligence race, casting the global economy as a looming conflict between “AI haves” and “have-nots.”
Speaking after Palantir reported 70% year-over-year revenue growth to $1.407 billion in the fourth quarter and a rule of 40 score of 127, Karp argued that the company’s performance exposed a widening gap between countries and institutions willing to overhaul themselves around advanced AI software and those content to tinker at the margins.
Noting that Palantir’s U.S. business grew 93% year over year in the fourth quarter, with America now accounting for 77% of total revenue, Karp asked hypothetically: “What do bombastic numbers like this mean?” It’s actually bad news that Palantir is “doing things unlike any other company has done,” he argued, because it raises another question: “This obviously has import for the world. And what does it mean for the world?”
Karp as Davos Man 2.0
Echoing rhetoric from the Trump administration on display at the recent World Economic Forum meeting in Davos (where Karp was a speaker), the Palantir CEO offered a withering critique of the companies failing to adopt AI. “We’ve also seen, unfortunately, that there’s a real hesitance to adopt these kind of products in the West outside of America, and the two places leading here are China and America,” he said. “What we’re seeing in America is so widely divergent. And so the non‑adopters, the have‑nots, are hoping for a catch‑up function.” Good luck, he seemed to say, asserting that Palantir’s earnings are a “breakout function” that mean “the way in which we view value is obviously no longer relevant.”
