从追缉本·拉登到AI战争，解密Palantir的崛起之路【深度】

What will future wars look like and what will

the defense industry giants behind future wars

look like?

"The military must have deterrent power."

"This is Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir."

Demonstrators: "Your weapons and AI are supporting genocide."

"You should be ashamed."

In this video, we will talk about the mysterious giant behind

Palantir.

In May 2025,

a truly modernized air battle took place over the India-Pakistan border.

If the India-Pakistan air battle in 2019

was still an air battle based on visual range, with

a combat radius of dozens of kilometers,

today, six years later,

this combat radius has been extended to 200 kilometers.

The fighter planes of both sides are engaged in "beyond visual range combat".

Behind such earth-shaking changes

is a set of data link attack capabilities.

The combination of this algorithm and hardware

is called "data link attack" in the military.

A month later,

on the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield,

Ukrainian army drones rushed thousands of miles to attack Russian air bases

to launch the "Spider Web Operation",

destroying several Russian strategic bombers.

Before the implementation of the plan,

Ukraine trained drones with AI algorithms and

conducted 3D modeling training for strategic bombers and early warning aircraft.

AI automatically identified these aircraft models

without human control

and launched attacks on engine, fuel tank, missiles and other parts.

The two recent local wars,

one subverted air combat

and the other subverted land combat.

They foreshadowed the future "advanced algorithmic warfare system"

, and big data and AI are the key technologies behind future wars.

In Silicon Valley, there is a very controversial company

that is accelerating the development of advanced algorithms for military and commercial applications.

This is Palantir.

Palantir became famous for two cases. The first was

to assist the US military in finding Bin Laden

by analyzing massive amounts of data and intelligence.

The second was to help several large banks

recover billions of dollars from Ponzi schemes

. After the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war,

Palantir's co-founder and CEO Alex Karp was

also a typical right-wing representative in the Silicon Valley technology circle.

He became the first founder of an American technology company to go to the front line of the war.

In an interview with Time magazine, he said,

"The Russo-Ukrainian war may be the last

large-scale war on the surface of the earth that mainly takes place in the physical world.

In the past, wars were struggles to control the physical world

, while the future 'virtual wars'

will be conflicts between algorithms."

The slogan released by Palantir in 2024 is simple and powerful.

The words at the end, "

Battles are won before they

begin," imply that "the outcome of the battle has not yet begun

," emphasize the strong blessing of algorithms on military power.

Now, with the rise of the right wing in Silicon Valley,

Palantir has almost become the representative of "national destiny stocks" in the US stock market

. At the same time, following the wave of AI,

Palantir hopes to use AI Agent

is used to apply AI algorithms to companies in the military and commercial fields

to help government forces and enterprises quickly improve efficiency.

This double blessing has caused

Palantir's stock price to rise 15 times

since the beginning of 2023,

exceeding Nvidia's increase

and being sought after by retail investors as one of the "AI belief stocks".

At the same time, Palantir's price-to-earnings ratio is as high as 520 times,

making the company one of the top ten in the US technology market value

. At the beginning of the video, let us first state that

we do not set up a position in this article.

We try to open Palantir's mysterious black box

from the perspective of technology and the commercial market

to see what this company does

and how powerful its algorithms are.

We also discuss with special researcher Yiming Yiqi

how Wall Street views "AI belief stocks" such as Palantir

and the so-called "No. 1 stock in the destiny of the United States"?

At the same time, the two Silicon Valley leaders behind Palantir,

CEO Alex Karp and Chairman Peter Thiel,

are the leaders of the current strong rise of the Silicon Valley right-wing wave.

I am also very curious about how their ideas are constructed,

so we also read Peter Thiel's biography

and Alex 's biography respectively. Karp's recently published autobiography

is very controversial. The two books

attempt to analyze this "Silicon Valley's most mysterious AI company."

As a big data company founded in 2003,

Palantir is still little known even after many years of its establishment.

This shows how mysterious it is. This

is mainly because Palantir's important client at the beginning was the US military

, and it is not easy to penetrate the military, gain trust, and obtain orders.

This biography of Peter Thiel, "The Contrarian",

details the details of Palantir's early rise.

In the first few years after its establishment,

Palantir racked its brains to penetrate the US military and obtain contracts.

"The Contrarian" wrote that

the company initially targeted

mid-level commanders in the military who were willing to try new things

and provided them with free versions of the software.

The commanders were attracted by Peter. Thiel called them "engineers and salespeople."

If they think Palantir's software products are easy to use

, they will naturally convince the military.

This strategy is effective.

In the past few years,

Palantir

has cultivated several lobbying forces within the military

from bottom to top , including Colonel

Harry Tunnell, the captain of the 5th Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 2nd

Infantry Division of the Army. In early 2010, he persuaded the US Army

to purchase Palantir's software for use in Afghanistan.

The use of this software in the Afghan war

attracted the attention of Michael Flynn, the head of US intelligence in Afghanistan

, and Flynn later became the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency of the Obama administration. Another long

line is Palantir's lobbying representative Terry Paul.

He successfully lobbied Congressman Duncan Hunter to hold hearings in Congress, which

also helped Palantir win many opportunities.

Not only the military

, but also the CIA is also a major customer of Palantir.

They purchased the customized software developed by the latter

to realize integrated information retrieval and extraction and analysis of key information.

Palantir, which has an increasingly powerful influence in Washington, is also becoming more and more powerful

and is not afraid to take major government customers to court

. In 2016, Palantir successfully won the lawsuit against the US Army

because the US Army refused to test The U.S. Army has been

considering commercial alternatives to its existing data and analysis platforms.

Since then, the U.S. Army has begun to choose one

of the two companies,

Raytheon and Palantir, which used to have a monopoly

, to develop the future intelligence platform.

In March 2019,

Palantir won the entire contract.

This is the first time that the government has chosen a private software company

to lead a defense project

. Palantir was able to win the favor of the U.S. military

not only because of the Washington lobbying group

, but also because of the support of internal connections and the courage in judicial means.

More importantly, it is because

the software service product must be easy to use.

During the war in Afghanistan,

almost everyone in the U.S. military recognized

the need for better intelligence systems to assess the safety of specific roads,

identify bombs and capture enemy troops.

But to the frustration of many intelligence personnel,

although they already have the intelligence they need,

such as records and locations of previous attacks,

types of bomb-making materials used

, fingerprint scans and mobile phone numbers of captured insurgents

, and reports on insurgents recruited by U.S. intelligence agencies, etc.

, this information exists in hundreds of government systems

and can be accessed by anyone with proper permission.

However it

is almost impossible

to synthesize this information to form useful conclusions,

such as which route a patrol should take

when planning to visit a neighboring village.

Palantir CEO Karp wrote in his autobiography, TechRepublic,

that he believed the problem was that

the designers of the military software system

included programmers from Lockheed Martin, a government contractor at the time.

They are too far away

from the actual users of the software

, that is, the soldiers and intelligence analysts on the battlefield.

In the words of Internet products

, the gap between users and developers is

too big to understand the real needs.

How does Palantir understand the real military's needs for software and data?

What is the good of its products?

In the next chapter,

let us delve into the mysterious Palantir.

Although Palantir is very mysterious

and a lot of information is very opaque

, it is now a listed company,

so there is a lot of information we can dig up.

If you look closely at Palantir's business,

you will find that it is quite unique.

There is no obvious peer to refer to,

and it cannot be completely classified into a definite category.

It is generally regarded as an "AI company"

, but after in-depth research, you will find

that it is both a data company

because it does a lot of data integration

and an AI Agent company.

Its core product AIP

is an enterprise-level AI Agent application .

At the same time, it is a consulting company similar to McKinsey and Accenture

. It provides IT consulting and AI solutions to companies in various industries.

It is also a defense company

because half of its revenue comes from the government and the military.

What kind of company is Palantir?

The key word here is

"customization",

which is very interesting.

If Palantir is a SaaS company,

the so-called Software as a As for software as a service,

we know

that most SaaS companies

try to standardize their business

so that they can quickly replicate it

to grab more market share.

But Palantir has taken the customized route from the beginning.

After signing a contract with a corporate customer,

it will send a team of engineers to the company

to deeply understand the company's business model,

mine basic data

, and then make a customized AI system deployment.

This kind of "customization" is what Silicon Valley companies try their best to avoid

because the model is too heavy,

but Palantir has managed to get through this path.

What's more interesting is that the market's imagination of Palantir

does not entirely come from government orders ,

because if It's just that the upper limit of the market space for government orders

is very limited,

especially now that the US government is still cutting spending.

The role of government orders is to provide a stable cash flow.

To open the ceiling of the company's growth

, it still depends on business in the commercial field.

In the commercial field,

Palantir's target customers are large companies.

The top 20 customers spend an average of $70 million a year

to purchase Palantir's products and services,

and indeed

only they can afford Palantir's "customized service".

These large customers include

Airbus, Morgan Stanley, Merck, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, etc.

It is customized in itself

and it is expensive,

but the high price makes sense

because it It can really solve many efficiency problems for enterprises.

For example, when Airbus built airplanes

, it spent tens of millions

to let Palantir customize software for it,

but its ROI (return on investment) for building airplanes increased to 25 times.

This thing is very budget-saving.

Data from the first quarter of 2025 showed that

Palantir had 769 customers

with quarterly operating income of US$884 million.

If converted into annual income,

the average income per customer is more than US$4 million,

which is very high by the standards of the software industry.

In addition, Palantir's top 20 customers contributed US$1.4 billion in revenue, accounting for

41.5% of the total revenue.

In other words, compared

with most software companies, Compared with the companies,

Palantir's largest customer revenue ratio is very high.

Whether customization is expensive is not that important.

What is important is whether

the money spent on Palantir

can bring enough value to the companies.

Palantir does not sell ordinary SaaS software

, but builds a customized "AI brain" for different companies

. These "brains" override all the company's original data and software.

What products does Palantir provide?

Many friends who have bought Palantir stocks

may not be able to tell what Palantir is doing

. Today we will take a detailed look at

its core product lines. There are four main

Gotham Foundry AIP Apollo

Now let's break down these four products in detail.

The first one is Palantir's Gotham.

This can be said to be Palantir's starting point.

Military and intelligence analysis products

mainly serve government agencies and defense departments.

The core of Gotham is to integrate multiple data,

especially those seemingly unrelated information, to integrate them together,

to discover financial fraud

through data analysis , to prevent terrorist attacks

, or to apply them to the military field.

The "seemingly unrelated information" here

specifically

includes various information sources,

satellite images, surveillance footage, bank statements, emails,

recordings, personal travel, traffic tickets, medical records, fingerprint information, etc.

By cross-integrating them

and discovering anomalies

, we can help analysts quickly gain insights,

optimize the decision-making process

, and even give early warnings to prevent problems before they happen.

The customer base of this product includes CIA FBI The U.S. military, NATO, etc.

We asked Yiming, a special researcher at Silicon Valley 101,

to explain to us

how Gotham works with an animation

. Gotham has actually been used on the battlefields of Russia and Ukraine.

For example, the commander enters the target coordinates on the computer,

and then the algorithm automatically calculates the firing direction and the distance to the target

, and assigns the task to the most cost-effective weapon.

This mechanism is very similar to the taxi app Uber.

One assigns passenger needs to the nearest driver

, while Palantir aggregates more information

and assigns the strike mission to the optimal artillery or missile.

Finally, Gotham also counts the results

and feeds the results back to the algorithm

to go through a self-learning process.

Of course, the above is only a

single-point application of a weapons management system and coordinated combat power.

Gotham is more powerful in that

it can provide a complete set of AI-driven combat systems

to provide overall decision-making advantages from space to the ground.

The process that may have required 2,000 people to make decisions in the past

can now be reduced to 20 people.

First of all, Got Gotham can integrate a large amount of information

into a battlefield assistant,

such as what the terrain is like, where the enemy is, what equipment

you have, what optional weapons and troops you

have, and what alternative combat plans you have.

These can all be automatically generated by Gotham and

finally given to the commander .

At this time, the commander's decision-making efficiency will be much higher

because he has obtained almost all the information.

After the action,

the subsequent real-time progress and predictions for the future

can also be generated by Gotham.

In this process, is

Gotham useful?

Is it regarded as a "God's perspective" by the military

or is it regarded as a vase that looks good but is useless

? The core lies in whether AI can discover

deep information that was easily overlooked by humans before.

Of course, Gotham has proved itself useful.

In the Afghan battlefield mentioned in the previous article,

there is a problem that has always been a headache for the US military,

which is "roadside mines".

Later, Gotham was used to find enemies who buried mines.

Gotham once found a local wearing a purple hat.

This was originally a scene that was easily overlooked.

However, when the system discovered that this color was very rare in the area,

it continued to track this abnormal feature

and combined it with other behavioral pattern analysis

to finally find that this person was the terrorist who planted landmines in the area.

What's more interesting is that

the local villagers later learned about this magical system

and actually came to ask the US military if they could help them

find who stole their sheep.

In addition, in the field of military intelligence,

Palantir's most well-known case

is that it helped the US military find Bin Laden's hiding place.

Palantir helped intelligence personnel

build a complete set of character knowledge graphs

to accurately screen out key figures' travel records

, communications, capital flows, and other clues.

The only courier of Bin Laden was Ahmed. Then

, by monitoring the courier,

they found that he frequently went in and out of a courtyard in Pakistan.

The courtyard had a 6-meter-high wall

with barbed wire and two security gates. The thickness of the

wall could withstand heavy firepower. The courtyard burned garbage on its own and

never dumped it outside. The residents never went out.

The neighbors also saw people in the courtyard walking close to the wall.

This behavior was very strange.

They might have done it to prevent aerial reconnaissance from photographing their faces.

These suspicious signs combined together

were very important clues.

Finally, the US military locked on to this as Bin Laden's hiding place.

In the book "The Finish" about how Bin Laden was killed

, the author Mark Bowden

said: Bowden wrote that

Palantir's software "is a true killer app."

I wonder why this is so good.

In the past, only humans could do these things.

First, I had to draw a battle map myself,

and then I would tell you

what the enemy did

and what our people did. And it's often not one person who can tell you.

There are many people,

and then there are another group of tactical advisors,

so it's a mess, and

the efficiency is definitely not that high.

But now everything is integrated into one app,

and you can just look at it yourself.

This is what Gotham does, which is

the ultimate improvement in decision-making efficiency

, and the quality of this decision-making efficiency is also high

because it has the ability to integrate all the information in the physical world

into its one app.

This is Palantir's best.

The second core business is Palantir's Foundry.

We know that Palantir

is vigorously expanding commercial orders.

The same technology can also be applied to the commercial field.

Foundry is Palantir's product for large enterprises.

By integrating the massive data of large enterprises

, algorithms are used to find anomalies.

In the financial field, fraud or financial anomalies can be found .

In the supply chain manufacturing field, it is used to help companies improve efficiency.

When we were chatting with some investors who invested in AI applications,

they believed that

a major difficulty hindering the application of AI to corporate customers

is that the original data sources are too complicated

and the data island problem

makes it difficult to truly cut into the enterprise's workflow

. Palantir Foundry was born to address this problem.

The essential logic of Foundry is similar to Gotham

, except that Foundry is targeted at the business field.

Foundry also integrates data scattered throughout the enterprise.

This is not a simple integration

, but a structured integration with the company's operational logic.

The logic applied is Palantir's "ontology",

which we will talk about later.

Foundry is used in all walks of life,

from electricity, petroleum, automobiles, aerospace

to manufacturing, retail, logistics, finance, medical care, etc.

For example, in the aerospace field,

Airbus is a typical example.

Airbus' supply chain is very complex.

An A350 aircraft consists of 5 million parts,

and it usually takes hundreds of teams to build it.

These teams are distributed in 4 countries. With 8 factories

, various data that drive production,

such as production planning, shift scheduling, parts delivery, work order quality management, etc.

, are also scattered in the hands of different teams in different countries.

This results in no one being able to answer key questions

in the production process of Airbus.

For example, at a certain point in time,

you want to know

what stage a certain aircraft has reached in

production . Each team makes decisions based only on the data it can obtain

without considering the overall

situation, which slows down the entire delivery speed. In

order to increase the delivery speed of A350 aircraft,

this is actually a problem of data integration and data collaboration.

Palantir sent a team of engineers to Airbus

to integrate all issues related to scheduling, personnel shifts,

parts delivery and quality

into the Foundry platform

, and created a unified user interface

to provide planning guidance and troubleshooting

for all personnel involved in A350 production. Supply chain managers, excluding

Airbus,

can use this system

to clearly see the real-time status of each link

, such as the supplier's delivery progress, the product status on the production line

, and the location of logistics transportation.

Foundry's built-in AI model

can also predict potential problems that may occur in certain links,

such as which suppliers may have delivery delays

based on historical data and external variables

such as weather strikes

, and provide multiple solutions based on these predictions

, and even compare the pros and cons of these solutions.

In the food industry

, for example, Tyson Foods uses Palantir's AI technology

to manage product distribution and inventory.

This problem has always been a pain point in the food industry.

Many products have a very short shelf life,

but customer demand is very unstable, sometimes large and sometimes small,

which makes it difficult to match supply and demand,

resulting in waste and dragging down profits.

Palantir's solution is

to integrate Sales data and inventory data.

Timely adjust inventory levels

based on sales history and real-time demand in different places.

Reasonable arrangement of product distribution

to ensure that products can be sold within the shelf life

to reduce the company's operating costs.

This is Foundry's business.

I feel that the market potential is still very large.

Of course, some friends will definitely notice

that Foundry is actually very suitable to become a third-party platform.

After all, it involves too many industries,

and each industry has its own unique know-how (skills).

Yes, Palantir is also trying to do this now.

Foundry has open APIs and data formats that

allow a variety of analysis tools to access

, thereby providing a variety of advanced analysis capabilities.

If more high-quality Agent entrepreneurs can be attracted to join in the future,

it will be similar to Apple's App Store ecosystem

, and we all know

that Apple's App The Store ecosystem

is the core engine of its high gross profit margin

. Next, let's take a look at

Palantir's third killer business AIP.

The third business is Palantir AIP.

This product will be launched in 2023. It

is the star product of this wave of AI craze

and the cornerstone of its "most promising AI Agent" story.

AIP is not an independent product,

but an interactive plug-in similar to that based on Foundry,

which allows you to easily call large language models on the market

, such as ChatGPT

, and combine it with Foundry's capabilities.

It is almost "out of the box" and "fool-proof operation".

The core of AIP is the application level.

It has achieved "visualization and de-coding"

, which greatly reduces the threshold for non-technical personnel to use Palantir's various functions.

Enterprise customers no longer need to hire expensive software engineers

or even data engineers to participate in project implementation. Non-technical personnel

can complete the originally complex technical operations

just like chatting with assistants .

AIP can be said to have lowered the threshold for using Palantir products

from the sky to the ground.

AIP is Palantir's Agent product,

which is also Palantir's core weapon for rapid growth in the commercial market.

Let's look at two interesting examples.

The first example is in the manufacturing scenario.

In the Panasonic Energy factory in Nevada,

millions of power batteries are being produced for electric vehicles.

The factory has an equipment maintenance team of 350 people.

But don't forget that

there are not enough industrial workers in many places in the United States.

This factory is located in Reno, Nevada.

This city is famous for gambling.

The headquarters of the world's largest slot machine company is here,

so there is no lithium battery manufacturing base here

. For Panasonic Energy, if

you want to It is simply a fantasy to recruit experienced technicians.

It is good enough to recruit people.

In many cases, they need to be trained from scratch.

A core equipment in the power battery factory

is the winding machine

, which assembles the positive and negative electrodes of the battery with the separator.

But when there are hundreds of machines in the workshop,

each machine has tens of thousands of moving parts, and

the daily data volume is very large,

many machines will generate many error codes

at the same time

. If you want to find a solution,

the trainer may tell you

that there are multiple solutions for each error

, but only some of the solutions have been tried before.

The rest can only be explored while working.

But if the maintenance team is still new,

the efficiency can be imagined.

Later, Panasonic Energy and Palantir jointly

developed a Copilot based on AIP. The AI ​​robot

is called "Atom."

As we move around,

we can see that there is a flashing red sensor

indicating that it is faulty.

Atom will then take that sensor data

and start building its recommendations

. Before Atom,

maintenance technicians had to search through multiple databases

and manually piece together relevant information.

This is a huge waste of time

when a piece of equipment is down right in front of you.

Now, at the touch of a finger, maintenance technicians can see

the previous work done on this winder, the spare parts replaced

, and the results of any recent quality surveys.

Panasonic Energy Plant

already has more than a million previous work orders

in its system , which are full of maintenance knowledge

. Atom That is, Palantir's AIP product

can read all historical maintenance data

and summarize them in order from easy to difficult to

guide technicians on how to proceed with their work.

After the repair is completed,

the technicians will record their repair process

and enter it into the system

to add bricks and tiles to the entire database.

This shortens the learning process of the entire new team

from the original 3-6 months

to just a few weeks.

In addition, this AIP product can continue to launch version 2.0,

from telling you how to fix the problem when it occurs

to actively predicting where the problem will occur.

In the future, Panasonic Energy

will build a second battery super factory

in DeSoto, Kansas, USA.

At this time, this AIP product It can also play a big role.

The second example is in some supermarket warehouses, which

involve labor management.

Take supermarkets for example.

You need to manage cashiers, shopping cart managers

, replenishers (to see which shelves are out of stock)

, beverage managers, stockers (to manage product displays and check price tags), etc. You also need

to dispatch different roles

according to customer flow .

At this time, you can use AIP.

It has a dynamic scheduling system.

If you are the boss of a supermarket,

you don’t need to know how to write code, you

can just talk to AI.

This is a supermarket’s "workflow perspective".

It can provide a real-time perspective of all business processes and operations.

You can see that the right side is a real-time running application.

If I drag it around

You can interact with the application directly as I just demonstrated.

Now what's really happening is that

when I click on these elements,

we can see that this panel calls up resources and schedules

and saves the schedule.

This is very smooth,

so when I operate back and forth in the actual application,

I can clearly understand what resources it uses. You can

create new scheduling requirements

in this system at any time.

If this requirement conflicts with the established rules,

AIP will tell you where the conflict occurs.

If there is too low efficiency,

AIP will also find it and tell you

how to optimize

this place .

Because this system is real-time,

it is very suitable for use

in

this kind of labor management scenario to reduce costs and increase efficiency. AIP's driving effect on Palantir's business growth is very obvious.

The second quarter of 2023, when AIP was first launched,

was actually the quarter with the lowest growth rate for Palantir.

Since then, revenue growth has accelerated every quarter.

There is no doubt that AIP has indeed contributed to Palantir's overall growth rate

, making Palantir

one of the few software companies that directly monetizes AI.

Palantir itself has no hesitation in

attributing its revenue growth to AI.

Between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025,

Palantir's commercial sector order revenue increased by 71%

, while the government business revenue increased by 45% during the same period.

In the U.S. stock market,

Palantir has also been included in the list of "AI beneficiary concept stocks" by market investors.

Since the second half of 2023, the stock price has soared.

Let's talk about the last important business, Apollo

Palantir Apollo. This product

is mainly used for software deployment and data integration of Gotham and Foundry .

One of its important features

is to solve data security and privacy issues.

Let's let Yiming join us to talk about this product in detail.

We know

that one of the major features of Palantir is "customization".

The data format and structure of each enterprise are different.

Apollo provides a software deployment base.

First, integrate the general things

and then customize them on top of them. At the

same time, it can automatically update and version management,

reducing enterprise operating costs. This

is very attractive to many traditional enterprise customers of Palantir

.

What are the problems of traditional enterprises?

First of all, its business is simple and inefficient.

It has been doing this for many years.

Their databases are very old

and they don't have Having the ability to change

this is what Palantir wants to do,

and the structure is simple.

I can use Apollo to help you change it directly.

They will focus on this market.

It has advantages,

so its story is actually very big,

but we still have to watch it step by step

and see how it does this business down to earth

. More importantly,

on the enterprise side

, if you want to truly apply AI

, data security is of great concern to enterprises.

Many companies want a database deployed in a fence,

and Apollo is particularly suitable for use in such a high-security environment.

Software deployment

can be achieved in isolated systems.

Since Palantir can meet the special needs of the military and defense,

the data security of commercial enterprises

is theoretically more than enough

. This also constitutes another core advantage of Palantir.

Whether it is technology giants such as Google and Microsoft

or Snowflake and ServiceNow, these data software companies

always have some businesses similar to Palantir

, but Palantir is indeed irreplaceable in terms of data security supervision and compliance.

Palantir does do one thing very well.

That is, it prioritizes

security, data privacy, safety, compliance and supervision

on its platform

because it has to do government orders.

Government orders have very high requirements for security and compliance

,

so they can also use their experience in these fields

and the company image it brings to it,

which will make it easier for them to gain the trust of some customers.

This part is naturally placed in its non-government orders.

Now in the AI ​​era

, this level has become a clear advantage for it. After all,

many business models of

technology giants

are actually based on selling data,

so when they promote AI on the enterprise side, they

often need to do more work

to make enterprise-level customers feel at ease to share their data.

But there are few such concerns about Palantir.

So in summary,

these tools have allowed Palantir's young people in their twenties

to snatch customers from IBM and Lockheed Martin in suits and ties,

because Palantir's products are deployed faster

and the results are clearer.

If we think further, if

the platform composed of Palantir's four major businesses

can become the key technology layer for building B-side enterprise-level AI Agents,

covering high-value scenarios in all walks of life,

this will put AI The story of Agent has reached a climax.

It is actually difficult to find a direct competitor for Palantir's business.

In a research report by UBS,

23 Palantir customers were interviewed

and they basically could not find a direct competitor of Palantir.

If we look deeper,

the real advantage of Palantir

, that is, the theoretical basis that

runs through all Palantir products

, is actually called data ontology.

It can be said to be a key to understanding Palantir products. It

is very interesting that

Palantir's founder Karp does not have a technical background.

He actually studied for a doctorate in philosophy in Germany.

But it may be his philosophical background

that has created the company's core competitiveness and made Palantir difficult to imitate.

The word Ontology

was first proposed by the German scholastic philosopher Rudolf Goklanu in the 17th century.

At first, it was a study of philosophical questions such as "the essence of existence".

But in recent decades,

this word has been applied to the computer industry

and has played an increasingly important role

in artificial intelligence, computer language and database theory

. Palantir uses "Ontology" The core concept of naming it

is to express how to transform

various transaction events in the real world into data and algorithms

through structured models

to establish a new "existence" in the virtual world.

This sounds a bit vague.

Let Yiming join us to talk about

how data ontology helps Palantir rise.

If ontology is applied to the business world

, it is actually about how to use a hierarchical structure

to express the concepts, features, relationships, networks, etc. of a specific field,

and provide AI with a knowledge graph to understand human society or company business,

and then use this knowledge graph to make inferences and take actions.

In real-world companies,

we have a lot of such hierarchical structures

, such as interlocking supply chains.

When building a new data platform for an enterprise,

ontology is to replicate as much as possible

all the existing relationships of customers in the real world,

including various production and sales relationships, internal structures, etc.,

almost replicating a customer's "digital twin"

so that customers can

complete the migration from the "physical world" to the "digital world" at a low cost.

In Palantir's own words,

ontology can be divided into three parts

: Data. Logic and Action.

First of all,

there is the problem of data swamp.

As the name suggests

, when you merge various data together,

the entire database will become a chaotic swamp

because the formats behind them may be different.

When you want to analyze a problem through a specific data, you

have to wade through this quagmire.

How does Palantir solve these problems? It

designs the database according to the knowledge graph based

on the idea of ​​ontology.

Palantir does not store the data itself,

but the relationship between these data .

When you need to find a certain type of data,

Palantir can essentially find it based on the relationship, which

will be much more efficient.

The second layer is Logic.

Palantir will design many models.

There are small models . The medium model and the large model

are divided into three layers.

The small model is mainly used to process the most original basic data,

which is more at the definition level.

The medium model is responsible for processing the relationship between them.

The large model is to make analysis and judgment.

There is also a layer-by-

layer progressive structure.

The third is Action

, which is to make decisions. It

also corresponds to the final application

link. That is, how to make the conclusions drawn

from these complex data

more quickly understandable to users

without the need for users to understand the code.

This is also the core concept of Palantir.

Try to lower the user's usage threshold as much as possible.

For many CTOs struggling in the chaotic ocean of data,

"ontology" is very attractive.

For example, a CTO from a very traditional chemical industry company

shared his

feelings when he first heard Palantir explain ontology

in a speech . After experiencing a very unfortunate project,

we were introduced to Palantir.

Our CEO said,

hey, you We should take a look at this solution

to see if it is suitable for us.

When I first saw the presentation,

I was deeply attracted by the concept of "ontology"

and thought, "Oh my God, this is a gift from heaven."

Fortunately,

it really lived up to its reputation.

We finally built an ontology model.

Interestingly,

I knew that the original system was in chaos,

but what really shocked me was that

Palantir generated a map

to visualize the degree of chaos.

Palantir has achieved all the functions we dreamed of.

Everyone here should resonate with this.

It can seamlessly connect to the legacy system

, automatically draw relationship maps, and accurately present the overall business status.

At that time, the company had just acquired a German counterpart.

Executives immediately found that

the company's data department was completely overwhelmed

because the data systems of the two companies were completely inconsistent

and the entire company had multiple ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems in parallel.

The data redundancy was serious.

The team spent a lot of time sorting out the messy code

just to confirm

"are these two materials the same?" "Are these products the same?"

This seriously dragged down efficiency.

Subsequently, the chemical company cooperated with Palantir

to develop multiple applications on Foundry

to speed up data cleaning and analysis.

It completely liberated the creativity of chemists.

This is a good example of how ontology works. It is equivalent to Palantir

building a real-time updated "digital twin"

for the company.

The boring data work is thrown to Palantir's AI

, and the chemists in the real world

have more time

to study new formulas.

Palantir's underlying idea "ontology" is indeed very interesting.

However, for Palantir,

the story of AI is a bright line,

but it has made Palantir a dark horse. The stock price soared and

the price-to-earnings ratio (PE ratio) exceeded that of the seven giants of technology stocks.

Another hidden

reason behind the average P/E ratio of more than 10 times

is

the concept trend of "national destiny stocks" in the United States

since Trump's victory and the rise of right-wing forces in Silicon Valley.

Next,

let's talk about the "national destiny" force behind Palantir.

Although Palantir is not a consumer brand

and its clients are all B2B companies

, it has accumulated a group of fanatical fans among retail investors.

According to FactSet data,

about half of Palantir's shares are held by individuals,

which

exceeds Tesla, which is loved by small investors.

Compared with Musk's "irreconcilable" relationship with Wall Street

, Palantir and Karp are obviously better at investor relations.

Palantir not only directly allows non-institutional shareholders to participate in earnings calls, but also directly allows non-institutional shareholders to participate in earnings calls. The Q&A session

also specifically targeted retail investors for comment.

There is a forum on Reddit dedicated to discussing Palantir stock

called r/PLTR, which

has about 60,000 members.

Supporters nicknamed the company "Pili"

and would snap up baseball caps and T-shirts with the Palantir company logo.

When we talked to many investors about Palantir,

they often shook their heads and said

"I don't understand"

because everyone found that

it was impossible to use some traditional financial valuation methods to look at Palantir

because it was too expensive no matter how you looked at it.

Of course, first of all, Palantir's performance is beyond

reproach. It always announces financial reports that exceed market expectations

. For example, the U.S. stock market has a rule of thumb for software/technology companies

called Rule The 40% rule

simply means that if the sum of the growth rate and the profit margin exceeds 40%

, it means that the technology company is very competitive

. Google's figure is 20%, Snowflake's is 30%

, and Palantir's latest 2025Q1 financial report reached 83%,

twice 40%. The benchmark

company's return rate comes from two sources:

one is its profit or revenue growth,

and the other

is its valuation growth.

If we maintain a more optimistic view

, for example, it is a company with an annualized revenue growth of 40% or 30%

or its free cash flow growth,

then Palantir's stock price of 90 yuan

has already overdrawn the revenue growth expectations for the next five years.

That is to say, if you only look at its growth, this company

's price has already entered the scene of at least three or four years later.

But we generally look at a company

one year ahead and we are already very optimistic.

For example, Amazon Meta in the optimistic period

is at most priced in to the middle of 2026,

but Palantir has already priced in. 2021

年

5

月

1

日

14

日

14

日

2021

年

1

...

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​Changes

or new interpretations of its technology

have improved the clarity and visibility of its revenue

, or its revenue has increased significantly.

In this case, its valuation can be improved,

but I think that

if Palantir's

EV/EBITDA (enterprise value/earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) is above 40 times,

which is

often the case for high-growth companies.

If Palantir does not use EV/EBITDA

but the most optimistic PS (price-to-sales ratio) for valuation,

it is already 70 times or 80 times, which

is already very high at this time.

In addition to its revenue growth and the improvement of its business visibility,

it is also priced in.

For example, Vance is the next president

, or Peter Thiel has done something

to get orders from foreign governments

, but in fact, this is not very realistic.

Wall Street investment banks like to use FCF (free cash flow) for valuation.

UBS predicts that 124 times FCF in 2025

will correspond to a price of US$80 per share

, but this level is still nearly twice that of high-growth software peers

Crowdstrike and Datadog.

Morgan Stanley Stanley gave

a neutral scenario of 88 times FCF corresponding to $60 per share.

Regardless of the valuation method,

Palantir is still the most expensive synonym for high-growth software.

If we use a more traditional P/E ratio indicator,

Palantir is more than 500 times.

It should be noted that Nokia was also a prosperous company

before the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000,

and its PE was only 100 times.

Tesla's PE was 350 times after the overcapacity hell in 2021.

Nvidia's PE was 250 times in 2023 when ChatGPT was very popular.

Palantir's valuation makes traditional valuation methods ridiculous on the one hand,

and on the other hand, it shows that investors are full of optimism about Palantir's expectations and

pin their hopes on it. It is a bigger story than Tesla and Nvidia.

Of course, using these valuation tools to explain Palantir may be futile.

After all, in addition to business and fundamentals,

one of Palantir's core logic

is the rise of the Silicon Valley technology right.

When such sentiment comes to Wall Street,

traditional valuation tools may not work.

The most important phenomenon behind

Trump's overwhelming victory

in the 2024 US presidential election is the entry of the Silicon Valley technology camp

. The political spectrum of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs and investors has changed significantly.

Many people have joined the right-wing camp,

including Musk, who was previously in charge of the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE),

David Sachs, an investor known as the "AI and Cryptocurrency Tsar",

and Silicon Valley VCs. Marc Andreessen of a16z

also published an article titled

"Why We Turned to Support Trump".

Of course, there is also Peter Thiel, whom we mentioned earlier.

They all hope to reshape the US technology policy . They

are dissatisfied with the so-called "pussification" of Silicon Valley technology,

which means that technology giants have become indecisive and timid.

They also angrily denounce the "political correctness" trend in Silicon Valley.

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar

published an article titled "Defense Reform",

in which he clearly expressed his dissatisfaction with the US defense industry.

He wrote that

we are in an undeclared state of emergency.

For more than 30 years,

we have accepted a stagnant defense industrial base.

This base was born out of a complacent and non-competitive "one-man show"

. This "one-man show" refers to the lack of competition within the US Department of Defense,

which makes it impossible for technological progress to be achieved within the government.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall,

only 6% of the US defense spending was spent on monopoly defense companies

, and the vast majority of spending went to companies that have both defense and commercial businesses.

For example, Chrysler produces cars and missiles

, Ford has been producing satellites until 1990,

and General Mills produces artillery and inertial guidance systems.

But today

This 6% has swelled to 86%.

The consequence of over-reliance on monopoly companies is that

commercial innovation has been decoupled from national defense.

Therefore, the technology right represented by Karp and Peter Thiel

dreams of bringing technological innovation back to the national defense ecosystem. In

the past few decades,

Silicon Valley elites have been proud of their claim to be "staying away from politics",

but now the rising Silicon Valley right is strongly fighting back against such Silicon Valley pride.

Karp wrote in his book,

"The risk is that a generation of Americans will be disillusioned with the nation-state

and indifferent to collective defense,

resulting in intellectual and financial resources

being undisputedly invested on a large scale

to meet the capricious needs of capitalist consumer culture,

which has led to the loss of America's cultural ambitions.

The technology industry is producing fewer and fewer

products with real lasting and collective value,

and people have handed over too much control to the arbitrariness of the market."

(My starting point for writing this book is that the West

should be superior

as a concept and practical principle , but refuses to admit this

because by refusing to admit it or denying it,

you can think you are smarter or superior than you actually are.

This has brought great difficulties to our society,

but here you may want to pay attention to

the industry's actual attitude towards Karp and Peter. Thiel's related remarks are controversial.

Critics believe that

the radical remarks of these two right-wing representatives

are mainly aimed at selling Palantir's services and products to the government

, and criticizing the current state of Silicon Valley technology is just their way of creating panic

. The book "The Contrarian" actually

raises very sharp questions about Peter Thiel and Karp

, including whether Palantir's big data services are effective,

whether it is Palantir's credit to find Bin Laden,

and whether Karp and Peter Are Thiel's words and deeds just for the purpose of sales?

So when we discuss the rise of the right wing in Silicon Valley in this section,

it is very important to "look at" their words dialectically.

Let's talk about Karp's claim.

Karp believes that

the United States accounts for nine-tenths of

the world's 50 most valuable technology companies today,

and the seven largest

companies among these 50 companies,

Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Meta and Tesla,

are all rooted in Silicon Valley or the West Coast of the United States.

This concentration of wealth and influence

is the first time in modern economic history,

but people demand too little in return from Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley engineers are given so much power and wealth

, but what should the public demand in return?

Free email is not enough,

so Karp is very unhappy that the mainstream characteristics of American society

are not civic or political.

It has become centered around entertainment, sports, celebrities, and fashion.

Karp's solution is to rebuild the "Techno-Republic," which

requires re-embracing collective experience, common goals, and identity.

This is also the origin of the title of his book.

We mentioned in the previous video

that Palantir's chairman is Peter Thiel,

the core figure of the "PayPal Mafia,"

and now the core force of the Silicon Valley right wing.

He also often expresses his dissatisfaction with the current state of the American technology industry.

If we regard the Apollo space program as the last great technology project,

we landed on the moon in July 1969,

and three weeks later the Woodstock Music Festival began.

In a sense,

technological progress stopped at that time,

and hippies took over the country.

I think we are progressing

much slower now than we were 100 years ago

. Previously, Peter Thiel and Karp's

very right-wing views are extremely controversial and even unwelcome in Silicon Valley.

Palantir has also been facing various controversies and boycotts,

including people opposing the police's use of Palantir's analytical software

because it may threaten civil rights and freedoms

. On the contrary, Amazon decided

to ban US police departments from using its facial recognition software,

and IBM went a step further

and announced that it would abandon all research and development of facial recognition capabilities

because IBM opposed the use of the technology for "large-scale surveillance and racial profiling" and

resulting in "violations of basic human rights and freedoms."

Karp was very indignant about these views.

He wrote,

"The country spent $25 billion

to protect soldiers stationed in Afghanistan from the threat of roadside bombs,

but when American lives were threatened in their own country,

the collective response was indifference and resignation.

It seemed that these people's lives were not important when judging whether to use certain software.

Many people in power in the United States

have basically given up their responsibility to solve the problem of violence.

Technology companies have been repeatedly warned

not to get involved in these areas."

But now things are changing .

Perhaps it is precisely because of the increasingly fierce international competition

that the Silicon Valley technology right has a greater voice.

As the right-wing trend gradually rises in Silicon Valley,

Karp and Peter Thiel is winning

the support and consensus of more and more technology leaders.

For example, the famous VC institution a16z used "American vitality" as the main theme

when raising new funds.

The key words are to invest in "the most core things of the country"

and "the best companies are those that conform to the national interests."

The investment scope is no longer shy about defense, public security,

education, industry, and manufacturing.

Palantir is also negotiating with more than a dozen Silicon Valley companies

to form a technology alliance

to jointly bid for US government projects.

The goal is to challenge the traditional defense giants in the United States,

such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, etc.

The companies that are negotiating to join include

Musk's SpaceX OpenAI, shipbuilder Saronic, and

artificial intelligence data labeling company Scale AI, etc.

In the secondary market of Wall Street,

American MAGA stocks represented by Palantir are also enjoying valuation dividends

, and Silicon Valley and Washington are entering a "honeymoon period".

I think it is more because

I mentioned that it sees

the market opportunities of the entire market environment,

the impact of geopolitics,

the increase in military orders, etc.

Because no matter who is the president,

the president's time is limited.

For example, Trump's term of office is actually only more than 3 years

, and there are mid-term elections. In fact, when you think about

technology investment

, we invest in companies not to plan for

the next two or three years,

but to invest in the next 7 or even 10 years.

So it is unlikely

to focus on investment in a certain industry

simply because of a certain current policy . It is more because everyone is judging that in the next 5, 7

or even 10 years.

The entire global geopolitics

may be in a relatively unstable state.

This unstable state will bring a lot of

demand for technological innovation in the military industry and defense.

These market opportunities and potential budgets will become a possible investment opportunity.

Perhaps Silicon Valley has never been far away from Washington and politics.

Once upon a time,

employees of Silicon Valley companies such as Fairchild, HP and Intel

could have enough food and clothing

thanks to the continuous defense budget during the Cold War.

It’s just that now

companies such as SpaceX and Palantir have become the new round of representatives of the Silicon Valley right,

and I don’t know

how long their stories can be told.

Thank you all for watching this episode of Silicon Valley 101.

I’m Chen Qian.

Your comments, likes and reposts

are the best motivation to support us in producing in-depth technology and business content.

See you next time. Bye