Data-mining software company Palantir Technologies recently passed Pentagon contractor and aerospace supplier RTX in market cap. This shows that the outlook for the military industry is changing.
Palantir provides AI-powered tools to government, civilian, and business clients. This year, the company’s shares have gone up 345%, valuing the business at $174 billion at the end of the trading day on Friday.
That is more than RTX, which has a market cap of $157 billion and has grown 40% this year. RTX is the parent company of Raytheon, Collins Aerospace, and Pratt & Whitney. It’s also more than Boeing’s $115 billion, which shows that the planemaker has had problems in both its passenger jet and space businesses.
It was already worth more than defense-only stocks like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which are worth $121.6 billion and $69 billion, respectively.
SpaceX, on the other hand, is about to become an even bigger giant. A bidding offer that would value Elon Musk’s rocket company at $350 billion is being thought about by Bloomberg. Before the bidding offer in June, the company was worth $210 billion.
SpaceX has been around since 2002 and is now the biggest launch service provider. They do missions for the military, NASA, and businesses all the time and also run a network of more than 6,000 satellites that are used by both military and civilian users.
SpaceX’s meteoric rise has been marked by technological feats that were once unimaginable and by the Pentagon putting more stress on space-based capabilities for future wars.
In the same way, Palantir’s latest stock rise comes after a string of events that show AI is becoming more important in the military and the tech industry is becoming more involved.
Just this week, Palantir and Shield AI decided to share some of their secret software to help make self-driving cars. Booz Allen Hamilton, a top government consulting firm, and Palantir revealed a “co-creation partnership.” Palantir and the defense tech company Anduril Industries also made a deal so that information gathered by Anduril’s Lattice software on the battlefield can be added to a Palantir platform. Separately, Anduril and OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, said they were going to work on methods to stop drones.
Palantir and Amazon Web Services agreed last month to let U.S. intelligence and defense services use Anthropic’s AI models. Meta, the company that owns Facebook, also said that its Llama AI models will be offered to defense partners.
Palantir reached a big milestone earlier this year when it won the Army’s Titan contract to make a next-generation targeting node. It was the first time a software company had been named a prime contractor for a Pentagon program.
A production operating system called “Warp Speed” was also made by Palantir. Shield AI, a new partner, will use it to make its own autonomous drones.
Like Tesla’s rise over General Motors in 2017, Musk led the charge to change the car business, Palantir is on the rise.
Today, Musk’s job as co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump administration could help defense tech companies that aren’t as big as the Pentagon.
Also Read: Palantir, Aws, and Anthropic Are Working Together to Sell Ai to Defense Users
Last month, Musk called the people who make human fighter jets like Lockheed’s F-35 “idiots” and talked up the future of self-driving drones. He wants to cut $2 trillion from government spending. This could make deals between the Pentagon that are very profitable more closely watched.
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