The Iran war has been great for business
The Iran War has been great for business at Palantir, as the Department of Defense has doubled usage of the company’s Maven targeting system in four months.
“Maven met its moment across real world events in Q1 … When the stakes are highest, when failure is measured in lives and readiness. This is where we are uniquely positioned,” Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar told investors during the company’s first quarter 2026 earnings call.
During the quarter ended March 31, which includes the start and the first month of the Iran War, the US government increased spending with the company by 84 percent year over year, to $687 million. That is a 20 percent increase from last quarter, when the US government spent $570 million on Palantir software.
“On the factory floor side, the demand on the defense industrial base to ramp production and sustainment has been so acute that we have surged resources from our commercial business,” Sankar said.
CEO and cofounder Alex Karp told investors that the US government and the company’s commercial customers know that Palantir will support the Department of Defense’s mission, whether or not the majority of American people support the war.
“We 100 percent prioritize this nation’s security over any other variable,” he said, before adding “By the way, we tell commercial clients, I tell commercial clients all the time: ‘We are highly monogamous in the way we work. We are not trying to make you into a commodity.’
“The only thing we will put above you is US national security. And by the way, we're more than willing to do this when it is unpopular or when it's popular.”
Karp said being unpopular is part of daily life for Palantir employees as they work with clients including governments that have been accused of war crimes such as targeting aid workers, lethal strikes on suspected drug boats, or the undeclared war on Iran that has killed at least 13 American service members and wounded more than 300 and caused unknown quantities of casualties in Iran.
The CEO said complaints about Palantir are “an ongoing thing” and that while “nine tenths of the world loves us, one tenth of the world professionally hates us.”
Palantir used its earnings call to show why some love it, citing its $484 million deal with the US Navy and the Maritime Industrial Base, which aims to shrink project delivery times with ShipOS. Palantir said its work has seen bill of material approval time fall from 200 hours to 15 seconds, speed of contract review cycles improve by between 575 and 73 percent, and monthly material planning time shrink by 94 percent.
Palantir’s quarterly revenue reached $1.63 billion, up 85 percent year over year with $1.28 billion of that spend coming from customers in the US. The company upped its guidance and now expects to reach at least $7.65 billion in revenue by the end of the year, about $470 million more than it expected at the end of last quarter. ®