KB, what do these names have to do with this post?
Regardless:
See the matrix below. $ONDS outclasses all of them for multi-domain, dual-use platforms. Also the clear winner for layered C-UAS.
$UMAC is also a component manufacturer, not a platform company. $AIRO isn’t even worth talking about and poses no threat to $ONDS at the current stage of their business.
@aleabitoreddit@zephyr_z9 Have you looked into Nokia as the next robotic infrastructure play? $NVDA invested a billion into $NOK for AI and 6G. You don't need 6G for smart cars; that's for drones and robotics
$PLTR + SAP+ Ghost Employees = continued printing
Why $PLTR isn’t above $200 after that print — and why the bears are missing the whole model.
Let’s address the two things analysts are stuck on:
1.“Palantir can’t keep printing 85% growth without massively scaling headcount.”
2.“US commercial growth can’t continue at 133%.”
Both assume Palantir scales like a traditional SaaS or SI firm. It doesn’t. That’s the entire point.
Palantir ended Q1 with 4,429 employees. Revenue per employee just hit ~$1.5M annualized. Rule of 40 = 145%. Adjusted operating margin = 60%. US revenue grew 104% Y/Y — the first time it’s ever crossed triple digits. US commercial +133%. FY26 guide raised to ~71% growth, US commercial guide raised to ≥120%. This isn’t a company that needs to hire 10,000 people to keep going. It’s a company that built a distribution model where it doesn’t have to.
Enter the “ghost employees.”
At SAP Sapphire 2026, SAP elevated Palantir AIP to an Endorsed App today and a Solution Extension in Q3 — meaning SAP itself sells, packages, and supports it. Accenture committed 88,000 SAP practitioners as the first global services partner. That’s not a press release. That’s SAP’s ~110,000-person field force plus Accenture’s 88K plus SAP’s 22,000 partner companies — all incentivized to sell Palantir into SAP’s 400,000+ customer install base ahead of the 2027 ECC end-of-life cliff.
SAP COO Sebastian Steinhäuser disclosed the numbers himself: >99% data validation accuracy in 2 weeks. >70% timeline and cost reduction. Two-thirds less reliance on scarce SAP experts. These are SAP-validated metrics, not Palantir marketing.
Now extend the model globally:
•Japan: Fujitsu is Flagship Technology Partner ($50M invested). SOMPO has 8,000+ daily Foundry users.
•Korea: KT Corp. is premium partner. Karp personally cultivated Korean Air, POSCO, LS Electric, Meritz.
•US: Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, EY, PwC all building Palantir FDE practices.
Palantir doesn’t pay these people. They’re carried on someone else’s P&L. They’re the FDE force multiplier that lets a 4,429-person company address a 400,000-customer SAP install base, plus DoD, plus every Fortune 500 commercial pipeline — without CapEx, without OpEx bloat, without margin compression.
This is why Karp wrote in the Q1 letter that Palantir can “grow 10x with fewer employees than we have today.” It isn’t a soundbite. It’s the operating model.
The analysts at $90 and $165 PTs are modeling Palantir like it’s Salesforce in 2014. The ones at $225 and $230 are modeling it like the channel/ontology moat is real. The market is currently splitting the difference at ~$135 because the multiple needs to digest — but the business did the opposite of decelerating last quarter.
US commercial growth doesn’t stall when SAP itself becomes your sales channel into the largest install base in enterprise software. It compounds.
The ghost employees are already hired. They just work for SAP, Accenture, Fujitsu, and KT.
“Dr Dave and Claude”
Inside an AI server today, the GPUs talk to each other through copper cables and small pluggable optical modules. Starting in the second half of 2026, that wiring gets replaced by lasers built directly into the chip package (CPO). Goldman thinks the market for that goes from roughly 0 to $91 billion inside 18 months.
That part the Serenity has right. What I’d slightly diverge on is who actually captures it. He says US names like Lumentum and Coherent are capped because they have to outgrow their own pluggable revenue getting cannibalized. True.
The usual response is to buy the pure plays i Taiwan, Europe, and Japan that have no legacy book. The cleaner version of that argument is to keep going one layer up. The laser is the visible part. The wafer the laser sits on is the invisible part, and it has zero legacy revenue.
CPO needs meaningfully more of that substrate per socket than plug-ins did. $SOI, which has the near-monopoly on silicon-on-insulator wafers for silicon photonics, still trades at a low multiple (attractive book value) while photonics peers trade at 5-8x sales.
$AXT and $IQE are the same setup on the indium phosphide side. There is also the supply question. Nvidia spent roughly $4 billion between Coherent and Lumentum, which effectively locks up their laser capacity.
Everybody else (AMD, Meta, Ayar, POET, Lightmatter) has to source elsewhere. Sivers is the small independent that catches that overflow.
And the layer nobody talks about is the assembly itself. Co-packaging an optical engine onto a chip is hybrid bonding. BESI just printed a record order quarter at €269.7 million with hybrid-bonding unit orders more than doubled sequentially.
The bottleneck for H2 2026 isn’t whether the optics work, it’s whether anyone in Taiwan can bond them onto the package fast enough.
The date I would put on the calendar is November 27, 2026. That’s when China’s export-control suspension on gallium, germanium, and antimony expires, about 6 weeks before the H2 2027 scale-up window.
If it gets re-imposed, the substrate names re-rate first, before anybody downstream sees a dollar of CPO revenue. Right gold rush. The interesting trade is one layer further up, where there is nothing to cannibalize and there is a date on the wall.
Mi abuelo fue encontrado pescando cerca de un estanque por un policía.
Su cubeta estaba llena de peces.
Policía: “¿Tiene permiso de pesca, señor?”
Abuelo: “No. Estos son mis peces. Los traje de casa.”
Policía: “¿Cómo que los trajo de casa?”
Abuelo: “Todos los días vengo aquí, dejo que naden un rato en el estanque y luego los llamo para que regresen.”
Policía: “¿Usted llama a los peces de vuelta?”
Abuelo: “Sí. Silbo y saltan directamente otra vez a la cubeta.”
Policía: “Bueno entonces… muéstreme.”
Así que el abuelo vacía tranquilamente la cubeta en el estanque y se queda esperando.
Después de un rato, el policía dice:
“¿Y bien?”
Abuelo: “¿Y bien qué?”
Policía: “¿No va a llamar a los peces para que regresen?”
Abuelo: “¿Qué peces?”🤔