Palantir Technologies reported second-quarter revenue of $1.94 billion after Monday's close, up 93% from a year ago. Adjusted operating margin was 62%. GAAP net income hit $1.06 billion, a 55% margin. Management raised full-year guidance to $8.16 billion. On Tuesday the stock jumped 29.5%, narrowly missing its best day ever.
Advanced Micro Devices rode the AI momentum up 7% during Tuesday's session, closing at $518.58 before reporting its own results after the bell. Revenue hit $11.5 billion, a 50% increase and a company record. Earnings per share came in at $1.66, beating the $1.55 estimate. The data center segment reached $6.7 billion, more than doubling year over year. AMD guided third-quarter revenue to approximately $13 billion. The stock fell 8% after hours.
The Numbers
AMD generated six times more revenue than Palantir. It kept 54 cents of every dollar as gross profit. Palantir kept 86. AMD's GAAP operating margin was 17%. Palantir's adjusted operating margin was 62%. AMD spent $808 million on property and equipment in the quarter, nearly triple the roughly $300 million analysts had expected, buying capacity for its Helios rack-scale AI servers. Free cash flow fell 39% from the prior quarter to $1.56 billion. Palantir's capital expenditure was negligible. The chipmaker builds the infrastructure. The platform company sells permission to use it.
The Deal
Two weeks before earnings, on July 22, AMD announced a $5 billion investment in Anthropic tied to a multi-gigawatt chip supply agreement. Anthropic will deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD Instinct MI450 GPUs beginning in the first half of 2027. The deal was AMD's clearest statement that it could compete with Nvidia for frontier AI workloads. It was also a diversification play for Anthropic, which had been running almost entirely on Nvidia hardware.
Five months before the deal, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk and ordered every federal agency to stop using Claude. Maven, the defense department's AI targeting system deployed across all 11 combatant commands, runs on Claude. The 180-day phase-out deadline expires in September.
Palantir operates Maven. The Claude ban did not damage Palantir. It validated the company's thesis. CEO Alex Karp has called frontier AI labs colonizers and positioned Palantir as the sovereignty layer that makes the underlying model replaceable while making itself irreplaceable. An enterprise that watched the Pentagon revoke its AI model overnight now has a reason to pay for that abstraction. Palantir posted its best quarter ever.
The Spread
AMD's stock had already risen 140% in 2026 before the report. Analysts said the bar was too high. But the gap is wider than positioning. AMD must spend to compete. $808 million in a single quarter on equipment, tripling its run rate, compressing free cash flow, all to hold a seat at a table where Nvidia still sets the terms. Every dollar AMD invests in capacity is a dollar the market discounts. Every dollar Palantir invests in its platform compounds.
The supply chain runs in one direction. AMD makes the silicon. Anthropic trains the model. Palantir controls the access. The company at the gate makes less revenue but keeps more of it. The company at the foundry makes more but must spend more to build the next mile. On Tuesday the market priced the difference at 37.5 percentage points.
There is a word for the company that makes the thing everyone needs but nobody values at a premium. It is called a utility. AMD posted the best quarter in its 57-year history, and the market treated it like a power company that left the lights on.