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It's peak earnings season!
This week, we'll visualize more than 50 reports ranging from Airbnb to Zillow.
Today's batch captures the mood of earnings season pretty well, with huge AI ambition, rising capital intensity, and a few quieter stories improving underneath.
Today at a glance: - Palantir: Sovereign AI - SpaceX: Growth Meets the Bill - AMD: Data Center Takes Over - Grab: The Overhang Shrinks
=== 1. PALANTIR: SOVEREIGN AI ===
Palantir Q2 revenue jumped 93% Y/Y to $1.94 billion ($130 million beat), marking the 12th consecutive quarter of acceleration. Adjusted EPS of $0.41 beat by $0.06. The Rule of 40 score climbed again to 155, with adjusted free cash flow reaching $1.22 billion at a 63% margin.
US revenue keeps pulling away. - US Commercial: $764 million (+149% Y/Y, +28% Q/Q). - US Government: $809 million (+90% Y/Y, +18% Q/Q).
Total US revenue reached $1.57 billion, up 115% Y/Y and now representing 81% of Palantir's business. International revenue grew a much slower 33% to $363 million, with CEO Alex Karp again dismissive of Europe: "The growth sucks."
The pipeline behind the print looks even more bullish. Palantir closed 220 deals worth at least $1 million, including 73 above $10 million.
TCV (Total Contract Value): The total value of contracts signed during the quarter reached a record $2.13 billion in US Commercial, up 153% Y/Y.
RDV (Remaining Deal Value): Contracted revenue not yet recognized climbed 124% Y/Y (and a staggering 27% Q/Q) to $6.24 billion in US Commercial, giving Palantir an increasingly large backlog behind future growth.
Palantir's new framing is "sovereign AI." Management argues customers increasingly want AI without handing proprietary data, workflows, or competitive intelligence to frontier model providers. AIP (Palantir's AI Platform) sits between companies and the models, letting customers swap LLMs while keeping their data and operational logic under their own control. Karp put it more bluntly: customers should not become "vassal states of the language labs."
We discussed last quarter that tokens are the new coal. Models and tokens are becoming cheaper commodities. Palantir wants to own the governed operational layer where companies turn them into actual work.
Palantir raised FY26 revenue guidance by roughly $500 million to $8.15–$8.16 billion, implying 82% growth, versus 71% expected just three months ago. US Commercial is now expected to grow at least 134% to more than $3.42 billion. Adjusted free cash flow guidance increased to ~$4.6 billion (from ~$4.3 billion previously).
Bottom Line: The fundamental story somehow keeps getting stronger. Revenue growth accelerated, US Commercial is now 39% of the top line, and free cash flow margins have crossed 60%. The valuation is still extreme at nearly 80x FY26 EBITDA, but Palantir is doing something equally extreme: accelerating above 90% revenue growth at nearly $8 billion of annual revenue while simultaneously expanding margins.
=== 2. SPACEX: GROWTH MEETS THE BILL ===
SpaceX's first earnings report as a public company showed why investors are excited about the business and why the valuation remains difficult to digest.
Q2 revenue nearly doubled to $7.8 billion, about $1 billion ahead of expectations, while GAAP EPS of -$0.09 beat by $0.20. Gross margin expanded 11 points to 55%, and the operating margin improved 22 points to -2%.
Let's review each segment:
Space revenue increased 29% to roughly $1 billion while losing $542 million as SpaceX continued pouring money into Starship. The rocket remains central to almost everything the company wants to do next, from launching larger Starlink satellites to eventually putting compute infrastructure in orbit.
Connectivity revenue jumped 66% to $4.3 billion as subscribers doubled to 12 million. In this segment, Enterprise and government revenue more than doubled, helped by airline and mobile partnerships and more than $6 billion of multi-year Starshield contracts. Starlink remains the product that funds Musk's ambition. The segment generated $1.7 billion of operating profit at a 39% margin, making it the only one of SpaceX's three businesses currently profitable.
AI revenue surged 247% to $2.6 billion, helped by new cloud compute agreements, but the segment still lost $1.3 billion from operations. The problem is what it costs to get there.
SpaceX spent $18.4 billion on CapEx in Q2, up from $10.1 billion in Q1 and $2.8 billion a year ago. AI accounted for $15.8 billion, or 86% of the total. The company is already monetizing that infrastructure through cloud agreements with customers including Google and Anthropic, but it is spending several dollars today for every dollar of AI revenue.
Bottom Line: SpaceX can afford the spending for now. Following its IPO, it ended Q2 with roughly $100 billion of cash and marketable securities. The bigger question is what return investors eventually get on that capital. Revenue is exploding, Starlink is becoming a highly profitable global communications business, and AI already has real customers. But Q2 also showed just how capital-intensive Musk's vision has become. Shares fell about 6% after hours despite the earnings beat. SPCX now trades more than 10% below its IPO price. As we explained at the time the company went public, it's usually best to wait it out.
=== 3. AMD: DATA CENTER TAKES OVER ===
AMD's Q2 revenue rose 50% Y/Y to $11.5 billion ($0.2 billion beat), while non-GAAP EPS reached $1.66 ($0.05 beat).
Data Center revenue more than doubled to a record $6.7 billion, ahead of expectations, and now represents 58% of AMD's revenue, up from 42% a year ago. The segment generated a 31% operating margin.
The CPU reawakening we discussed last quarter accelerated. EPYC and Instinct both contributed to the 107% Data Center growth, reinforcing that the AI buildout is lifting more than GPUs. Inference and agentic workloads require large amounts of CPU capacity alongside accelerators, giving AMD another way to participate in AI infrastructure spending while it continues taking server share from Intel.
The next leg depends on Helios, AMD's full-rack AI system combining its GPUs, CPUs, networking, and software. Lisa Su said Helios is beginning to ramp, with Meta and OpenAI among the first large deployments and Microsoft, Oracle, and Anthropic also lined up as customers. AMD is increasingly competing with NVIDIA at the system level rather than selling a cheaper accelerator.
Outside Data Center: Client revenue grew 23% to $3.1 billion on continued Ryzen strength. Gaming fell 31% to $779 million as semi-custom revenue declined. Embedded improved 19% to $977 million as demand recovered across several end markets.
Management guided Q3 revenue to $13.0 billion at the midpoint, about $0.5 billion above consensus, implying 41% Y/Y growth and another 13% sequential increase. Gross margin should reach 56%. Yet shares fell about 9% after hours after a big run in the past week. The stock has more than doubled so far this year.
Bottom Line: The numbers were strong, but expectations have moved even faster. With Helios only starting to ramp, the bigger test comes in 2027, when AMD needs to turn its growing list of AI partnerships into the tens of billions of Data Center AI revenue it has been promising.
=== 4. GRAB: THE OVERHANG SHRINKS ===
Grab Q2 revenue grew 22% Y/Y to $997 million (~$6 million beat), while adjusted EBITDA jumped 54% to $168 million, the 18th consecutive quarter of growth. Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 17% from 13%.
On-demand GMV reached $6.5 billion (+22% constant currency), and Monthly Transacting Users hit a record 54 million (+17%). Most of the growth is still coming from adding users: GMV per MTU increased just 4% constant currency.
Indonesia officially cut GrabBike commissions from 20% to 8% on July 1, but importantly the rule applies specifically to two-wheel passenger transport, not GrabFood, GrabExpress, or four-wheel mobility. That means Q2 barely reflects the impact, but Grab has now raised FY26 guidance with the rule already in effect.
Sidenote: Grab's $234 million net profit was boosted by a $307 million one-time accounting gain from consolidating Superbank, partially offset by $183 million of fair-value losses. These are non-operating items, so the $19 million operating profit and $168 million adjusted EBITDA are cleaner measures of underlying performance.
The core businesses remain healthy: Deliveries: GMV +24% constant currency, with adjusted EBITDA jumping 53% to $96 million. Margin reached 2.3% of GMV from 1.8%, helped by operating leverage and advertising. Mobility: GMV +18%, while transactions surged 28% as cheaper offerings expanded usage. Adjusted EBITDA grew 16% to $191 million, though margin dipped slightly as Grab spent more supporting driver supply amid higher fuel costs. Financial Services is accelerating. Revenue surged 59% to $134 million and loan disbursements grew 72% to a record $1.2 billion. The gross loan book reached $2.3 billion, nearly triple Y/Y because of the Indonesian digital bank Superbank consolidation, but it still doubled organically excluding Superbank. Segment EBITDA improved to -$15 million from -$26 million. Grab also completed its $425 million acquisition of Stash in July, adding a profitable US investing platform with more than one million subscribers.
Overall, revenue guidance increased by $55 million to $4.10–$4.15 billion (+22–23%), while adjusted EBITDA moved to $720–$740 million (+44–48%). Management explicitly says the raise reflects both underlying strength and the consolidation of Superbank and Stash, so some of the upside is inorganic. Still, the feared Indonesia-driven guidance cut that pressured the stock price was unwarranted.
Capital allocation is getting more aggressive. Grab completed its previous buyback program and authorized another $750 million, bringing cumulative authorization since 2024 to $1.75 billion. Net cash liquidity still increased sequentially to $5.4 billion.
Taiwan regulators extended their review of the $600 million Foodpanda acquisition until October 27, specifically citing competition concerns in a market that would remain a duopoly. The deal is therefore less certain than it looked three months ago.
Bottom Line: Core GMV growth remains above 20%, Deliveries margins are expanding, and Financial Services is scaling rapidly. But the second half will be the first period showing the full Indonesia impact, while the Foodpanda Taiwan deal now faces a tougher regulatory path.
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That's it for today!
Stay healthy and invest on.
Disclosure: I own PLTR, AMD, and GRAB in App Economy Portfolio. I share my ratings (BUY, SELL, or HOLD) with App Economy Portfolio members.
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