Back in February, Alex Karp was talking ’bout a revolution or two.
The co-founder and CEO of Palantir (PLTR) was sharing his thoughts on the efforts of Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to root out government waste.
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“There’s two revolutions happening,” Karp said on CNBC. “One is transparency and one is AI. Okay, so why is it that we do not know where every penny of our money goes?”
Large language models, which are artificial intelligence constructs designed to understand human language on a massive scale, can go into government contracts and “see exactly what happened,” Karp said.
Karp. who said Musk was “the most important builder in the world,” criticized Democrats for doing “a suicide dance” by failing to engage with Musk and to acknowledge that he was “clearly the most qualified person in the world to do something like this.”
Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s company has a deal with NATO.
Analyst: Palantir in sweet spot for wave of federal spending
Things have changed a bit since then, as angry constituents filled Republican town meetings to blast Doge and Musk, whose poll numbers have been tanking. (GOP leaders have claimed the meeting participants were paid protesters.)
Palantir is part of an effort by Doge to build a new mega-application programming interface to access Internal Revenue Service records, Wired reported, citing IRS sources.
Doge is looking for the Denver big-data-analytics company’s Foundry software to ultimately become the “read center of all IRS systems.”
But that’s not the only deal Karp and his crew have going on.
Palantir’s shares were climbing recently following an announcement by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The military alliance of countries primarily from Europe and North America said that on March 25, the NATO Communications and Information Agency finalized the acquisition of Palantir’s Maven Smart System, to be employed within NATO’s Allied Command Operations.
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The MSS capability empowers commanders and warfighters to leverage artificial intelligence safely and securely in core military operations, NATO officials said.
William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma said the agreement “has broader geopolitical significance than just another win for Palantir in the context of investor concerns that Europe is looking to decrease reliance on U.S. defense contractors,” according to Investors Business Daily.
DiPalma said the system was being widely deployed by U.S. forces.
“The NATO announcement emphasized how the software procurement was one of the fastest in NATO’s history, reflecting the critical need to acquire the software,” he said.
DiPalma says the award has favorable read-throughs across the U.S. defense sector, adding that Europe will likely remain large buyers of U.S. systems with increasing defense budgets.
Veteran trader cites tech reshoring
Wedbush analysts say the deal represents an additional tailwind for Palantir. Artificial-intelligence initiatives across both the U.S. and European governments are accelerating as AI remains a strategic focus on the federal front, according to The Fly
The investment firm sees Palantir in the sweet spot to benefit from a tidal wave of federal spending on AI across North America and Europe.
Wedbush said outperform-rated Palantir remains one of its top names to own in 2025.
TheStreet Pro’s Stephen Guilfoyle saw wider implications for the Palantir-NATO agreement.
The veteran stock trader, who recently raised his price target on Palantir to $116 from $110, said in his recent TheStreet Pro column that he wanted readers to think about U.S. manufacturers that probably will reshore at least part of their operations.
Even Apple (AAPL) , he said., which makes just about everything it sells in Asia and the majority of these products in China, has committed to $500 billion in U.S. investment over the next four years.
“Should there actually be an increase in the building, rebuilding and modernizing of factories and plants in the U.S., in order to become competitive and somewhat margin-friendly, these businesses are going to have to develop new ways of building things here in the U.S.,” Guilfoyle said said.
“There will be jobs, probably good jobs, but not hard-hat, lunch-pail, eight-hours-a-day type jobs.”
Related: Palantir launches controversial new workplace initiative
And Apple’s not the only tech outfit looking to build on U.S. soil, as the sector looks to boost domestic manufacturing in light of President Donald Trump’s trade policies.
AI-chip maker Nvidia (NVDA) said it planned to produce an American-made supercomputer from a U.S. platform, and planned to produce as much as $500 billion in artificial-intelligence infrastructure over the next four years as part of a partnership with Foxconn (FXCOF) and Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) .
Guilfoyle, whose career dates back to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1980s, said these facilities would have to use cutting-edge technology, and workers would need to be able to work with and complement a 2025 “assembly line.”
He says Palantir will benefit from any industrial or technological reshoring effort as robotics, artificial intelligence, and the optimization of big data will likely be more in focus than ever before.
“This should boost, one would think, Palantir’s commercial business,” Guilfoyle said. Palantir’s “fortress-like balance sheet … should allow for any corporate flexibility required as the firm could be pulled in multiple directions.”
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