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🚨 This AI company is the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 over the last year.

Its market cap has soared nearly 600%. And it is now among the TOP 10 most valuable software companies in the world.

Let’s break down its meteoric rise 🧵👇

The company is Palantir.

👉 It was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel - PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor.

Other founders include Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings.

Palantir was built to help governments fight terrorism & financial fraud using big data & AI.

👉 The name Palantir comes from The Lord of the Rings

In Tolkien’s world, a Palantír is a “seeing stone” that allows people to see across vast distances and uncover hidden truths — just like Palantir’s AI does with data.

👉 The idea came from PayPal’s fraud detection system.

If AI could spot suspicious transactions, why not use the same tech for national security?

That’s when Palantir caught the attention of In-Q-Tel which is the CIA’s venture capital arm.

👉 Initially, Palantir struggled because government agencies weren’t used to working with Silicon Valley startups.

But by the 2010s, it became a key player in defense, law enforcement & finance, working with the US Department of Defense, FBI, NSA & Wall Street banks.

For years, Palantir operated behind the scenes—secretive, mysterious.

But in 2020, it went public and is now a major force in AI-driven data analytics, serving both governments & corporations.

👉 Fast forward to January 2025—Palantir’s stock soared 24% after crushing Q4 2024 earnings & giving a bullish outlook for Q1 2025.

This rally has made it the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 over the last year.

👉 Palantir has now entered the $200 billion market cap club, joining the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

Its market cap jumped from $34.7B to $236.5B in just a year—a staggering 594% rise!

Palantir’s business growth is backed by strong Q4 2024 results:

1. Big Deals: Closed 129 deals worth at least $1M each. 1 in 4 deals are exceeding $10M
2. Strong Cash Position: Palantir ended Q4 with $5.2B in cash & U.S. Treasury securities
3. Zero Debt: Palantir’s zero debt status is a stark indicator of its financial health

Palantir is at the center of the AI revolution.

With its unique position in government & enterprise AI, it might just be one of the most influential AI companies of the decade.

Are you betting on Palantir? 🤔

A little-known Chinese AI startup, DeepSeek, has sent shockwaves through global markets.

It is challenging giants like Nvidia, OpenAI, and Google.

Its low-cost AI has triggered a selloff in US tech stocks and wiped out over $1 trillion in market value!

Here’s the FULL story 🧵👇

Founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek first made waves with its DeepSeek Coder and LLM models.

Its real breakthrough came in May 2024 with DeepSeek-V2 — a high-performance AI developed at a fraction of the cost of its competitors.

Their latest model, R1, has pushed the boundaries even further.

👉 DeepSeek claims that R1 matches OpenAI’s O1 model, achieving a 97% success rate — but at 95% lower costs 👈

To put it into perspective

🔹 OpenAI O1 cost per million tokens: $75
🔹 DeepSeek R1: $10.24

That’s 86% cheaper!

A pricing disruption that’s already impacting global markets.

Globally, it has fueled fears of reduced demand for expensive GPUs.

👉 This has lead to a historic $600M drop in Nvidia’s stock — the largest single-day loss ever for a US company.

Adding to the drama, DeepSeek achieved all this with just 220 employees and $50M in funding.

Meanwhile, OpenAI employs 4,500 people and relies on billions in investment.

DeepSeek isn’t using cutting-edge hardware like Nvidia’s H100 GPUs.

Instead, they’ve innovated with H800 GPUs, sidestepping US tech sanctions.

DeepSeek has also partnered with AMD to build even more efficient AI models.

But it’s not all smooth sailing.

👉 Despite its success, DeepSeek has raised concerns over heavy censorship.

Discussions on sensitive topics related to China are met with responses like: “Let’s talk about something else.”

As DeepSeek overtakes ChatGPT in app downloads, the big question remains.

Can US tech giants fight back? Or is this just the beginning of a new era for AI?