Google Cloud + Palantir Growth Rates Show What Enterprises Want from AI

**bob evans** (0:00)
Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Cloud Wars Minute. Now that we are more than halfway through the year, we got Q2 earnings season coming up. And a couple that I'm looking for in particular are for Google Cloud and Palantir because their growth rates have been so much above the norm here, even among the Cloud Wars top 10 companies. I think what we see in those growth rates and in the numbers behind those is a reflection of what customers really want from AI and the Cloud here in the AI revolution. And I think that if we take a look at the past, we'll see this trajectory I'm talking about, and we'll see if for Q2 in a couple of weeks, if both companies keep it up. Google Cloud will release its Q2 numbers on July 22nd. Palantir will release Q2 numbers on August 3rd. But if we take a look back, we see the arc that they've built over the last five quarters and we'll see in the days coming up here if they can match that. So what I've done is put together for both Google Cloud and Palantir, look at the last five quarter results with the growth rate and also the revenue for each quarter. Let's take a look at these first for Google Cloud, which is the number one company on the Cloud Wars Top 10 Palantir is number five.
For Google Cloud, and the quarter ended a few months ago, March 31st. Their growth rate was 63 percent. Their revenue was $20 billion.
Q4, 48 percent, 17.7 billion.
Going back to Q3, 34 percent, 32 percent in Q2, 28 percent in Q1. So we see for the last five quarters, Google Cloud has been on not only an upward arc, but one that has soared over the last couple of quarters, 48, 63, as we see as their revenue has come up. That to me represents that in a market filled with very, very good competitors, Google Cloud has been doing some quite powerful. In a detailed article that I'll have on cloudwars.com later this morning, I go into detail about those five points and I'll touch on them briefly here in a moment. Now let's look at Palantir with those same five quarters, going back to Q1 of 2020-20, sorry, Q1 of 2020-20, Q1 of 2025 There I did it and up through here Q1 of this year.
Most recently, 85% growth rate with over $1.6 billion in revenue, 70% before that, 63% before that, 48, 39
So, in both cases, we see the company even as their revenue base gets bigger, they're growing much, much faster coming forward. That isn't a reflection of low prices or heavy advertising. That's a reflection of customers picking these companies saying, I want you to take me into the AI future because you can do some things that nobody else can do. And as I mentioned, I want to toss out five ideas here. I think there's many others, no doubt, fantastic technology for both companies. But these are more about the mindsets they have. They were AI native before it was cool, right? Every tech company says, oh, I've been doing AI for decades. Both of these companies have been in it as a source of high differentiation for more than a decade. This idea of meet customers where you are, again, I think every tech company wants to say, oh, sure, I do that. It's been a core part of Google Cloud since Thomas Curran took over as CEO seven years ago. It was one of the things he really harped on in his early days there, but that's what was going to allow Google Cloud to differentiate itself. And Palantir is 24 years old. This is not a startup company, although they just sort of burst onto the scene. I wonder if in some ways Palantir's technology was out ahead of where the market was. But now that the AI boom has sort of swept the world, Palantir's technologies are now suitable to companies of any size to help take what they have and use that as a foundation to build into the future. Open, everybody talks about it. Who's really delivering it? Google Cloud's got that on as high a level as anybody. Palantir, I think sometimes the unique approach is it takes people, especially its competitors, try to say, well, that's closed, they're not really open. Innovation and going to market as well as in technology, some new approaches to things and using their ecosystem. I think particularly Google Cloud here has been an extraordinary example of this and I refer in this article to their recent disclosure that while OpenAI and Anthropic, AWS and Microsoft are all launching company-owned deployment units to pull off these big AI projects, Google Cloud is relying 100% on its ecosystem to do that. Fascinating times here, I'll be eager to see how these companies do in Q2 and we'll follow up with those and the other Cloud Wars top 10 companies how they've done in calendar Q2. But I really take my hat off to Google Cloud and Palantir for in this very intense time, enormous market, everybody's going after it and their growth rates are soaring. They're doing something different, and the customers are rewarding them for that. Thanks for being with us here at Cloud Wars Minute. I hope you have a fantastic day.