Palantir Q3: revenue up 96% as U.S. commercial overtakes government, and management says it lacks the bandwidth to meet demand

Palantir, the company that popularized the forward deployed engineer, reported third-quarter 2026 revenue of $2.313 billion on November 2, up 96% year over year and 20% from the prior quarter. U.S. commercial revenue grew 148% to $984 million and, for the first time, exceeded U.S. government revenue ($953 million). The company raised its full-year revenue guidance to about $8.53 billion and its U.S. commercial outlook to more than $3.559 billion.

On the earnings call, executives described customers moving much faster from first contact through pilots to production, citing several pilots that converted into eight-figure annual contracts within a quarter or two. CEO Alex Karp said the company now has to re-resource itself to focus on these customers because it does not have the bandwidth to serve them all. CTO Shyam Sankar argued that the unit of value in an enterprise is the workflow rather than the individual knowledge worker, and that Palantir's work is integrating AI, software and people into those workflows, including post-training open-weight models on customers' own data.

CFO Dave Glazer said adjusted expenses rose 53% year over year, mainly from investment in the AI platform and technical hiring as Palantir welcomed its latest class of new-grad hires.

Why it matters for FDEs: Palantir remains one of the largest employers of forward deployed engineers, and its commercial business, which runs on embedded delivery with few salespeople, is now its biggest. A company saying it is capacity-constrained while growing technical headcount is a strong signal of continued demand for deployment engineers, and its workflow-first pitch is the model many newer FDE teams are copying.