The Explosive Numbers That Make Palantir a Buy Right Now

Palantir Technologies (NYSE:PLTR) sits at the center of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution as the leading enterprise AI software platform. Its three core products — Gotham for government and defense, Foundry for commercial data unification, and the rapidly adopted Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) — enable organizations to turn raw data into real-time, actionable intelligence at scale.

In 2025, Palantir has reached escape velocity: U.S. commercial revenue is growing triple digits, bootcamp-driven deal cycles are collapsing from months to weeks, and the company is routinely closing seven-figure contracts within days of customer demonstrations. Few software companies have ever combined this level of product-market fit with such massive untapped demand.

The result? Palantir possesses the extraordinary characteristics — hyper-growth revenue, accelerating profitability, and explosive cash generation — that can make it a tremendous multi-year compounder for investors.

From Triple-Digit Growth to Cash Flow Dominance

Some analysts now project Palantir to deliver revenue growth exceeding 100% in 2026, pushing total sales well past previous highs as the U.S. commercial segment alone scales toward a multi-billion-dollar run rate. This isn’t speculative hype — the acceleration is already visible in recent quarters, where U.S. commercial revenue more than doubled year-over-year in the third quarter, and total revenue beat estimates by wide margins.

They also expect earnings per share to surge more than 200% year-over-year in the same period, driven by gross margins that have climbed above 80% and operating margins expanding from negative territory just a few years ago to the mid-40% range by 2026.

Most striking is the anticipated free cash flow profile: operating cash flow is forecast to exceed well over $2 billion in 2026 — a greater than 500% increase from recent levels. This cash generation is structural, not cyclical, because AIP and Foundry are high-margin, sticky software subscriptions with minimal incremental costs once deployed. Once a customer’s ontology is built inside Foundry or AIP, switching costs become enormous, and incremental revenue is nearly pure profit.

For investors, this combination means a rare trifecta: explosive top-line expansion, rapid margin improvement, and a growing fortress balance sheet that can fund acquisitions, share buybacks, or simply compound at high rates of return while the stock remains priced at only about 28× 2026 earnings — cheaper than many software peers growing at half the pace.

Why the Math Screams Multi-Year Upside

Let’s begin with a caveat: the mainstream Wall Street consensus for 2026 adjusted EPS sits around $0.80 to $0.95, putting the stock at 170x to 200× forward earnings at today’s $162 price — expensive by any traditional metric.

However, a growing camp of bullish analysts and investors project a far more aggressive path: 2026 adjusted EPS in the $5.50 to $6.50 range. Under those scenarios — which assume U.S. commercial revenue continues compounding at 70% to 100% for several more years, global catch-up accelerates, and operating margins push toward 45% to 50% — Palantir suddenly trades at only 26x to 30× next year’s  earnings.

That 28× figure is not the consensus view today, but it is the math that many long-term bulls are betting on. History shows that when a software platform hits true product-market fit during a major technology shift, the early growth rates often prove conservative, and earnings surprises compound rapidly. Even if the company “only” grows into the high end of today’s consensus over the next few years, the current price already embeds a significant slowdown that may never arrive.

For investors comfortable looking two to three years out — past the point where the cash-flow inflection becomes undeniable — the more optimistic 2026 estimates make Palantir look dramatically undervalued relative to both its trajectory and to slower-growing software peers trading at similar or higher multiples today.

Key Takeaway

Palantir is living through one of the cleanest software inflections in market history — similar to the early cloud migrations of the 2010s, but compressed and accelerated by generative AI urgency. Growth rates of 100% revenue, 200% EPS, and 500% operating cash flow are extraordinary and, admittedly, difficult to maintain indefinitely.

Yet even if those figures moderate to “merely” 40% to 50% in the years that follow, the starting base will be dramatically higher, and the valuation multiple is likely to expand as the cash flow story becomes undeniable. Investors who buy during this brief window of maximum growth acceleration have historically been rewarded with multi-year outperformance.

Palantir Technologies today offers exactly that opportunity: a chance to own an explosive growth stock at the precise moment its financial profile shifts from promising to dominant.