Financial Services, November 6 (Editor: Xiaoxiang) Nvidia just overtook Apple again this Tuesday and once again climbed to the top of the global corporate market capitalization ranking. However, in another list focusing on the increase in stock prices of S&P 500 constituent stocks during the year, Nvidia's ranking fell one place instead.

According to industry statistics, Nvidia is currently in third place among the companies with the biggest increase in the S&P 500 index during the year. Meanwhile, in mid-September, the stock had the highest increase for a while.

So, which demon stock is this ferocious?

The answer is data analysis software company Palantir Technologies.

On Tuesday, Palantir's stock price surged nearly 23% after the earnings report was released, and the cumulative increase since this year has reached 195%. This figure has surpassed Nvidia's 181% increase so far in 2024, but it still lags behind the 212% increase of leading US electricity supplier Vistra for the time being.

Palantir was included in the S&P 500 index in September of this year, while Vistra was included in May.

Interestingly, all three companies are currently entering the AI themed circuit in different ways. Needless to say, Vistra fully explains why “the end of AI is electricity,” while Palantir shows the application of artificial intelligence technology in the software field — an enterprise software company that serves government and commercial customers is expected to continue to grow at an accelerated pace, as more and more companies are seeking Palantir's AI platform to test, debug, and evaluate various AI-related scenarios.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a shareholder letter on Monday, “Our business is growing at an accelerated pace, and our financial results have exceeded expectations as we meet the firm demands of the US government and commercial customers for cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology.”

Nvidia is the epitome of the global wave of artificial intelligence over the past few years, as its advanced GPUs are the backbone of the AI revolution. And although Nvidia and Palantir do different things and are on a different scale, at a time when Wall Street is skeptical about the potential of artificial intelligence to bring financial returns, people are comparing it to Nvidia's way of obtaining financial benefits from artificial intelligence.

In the company's history, by analyzing massive amounts of data and intelligence, Palantir helped the US military successfully locate Al-Qaida's head bin Laden.

Palantir currently predicts that the company's 2024 revenue will be between 2.805 billion US dollars and 2.809 billion US dollars, higher than the previous forecast of 2.742 billion US dollars to 2.75 billion US dollars; it has also raised the annual profit forecast range to about 1.05 billion US dollars to 1.06 billion US dollars. The previous forecast was 0.966 billion US dollars to 0.974 billion US dollars. “Revenue growth driven by the demand for artificial intelligence is turning into profit,” said David Glazer, the company's chief financial officer.

An analyst at D.A. Davidson also pointed out last week that compared to other companies (not including Nvidia), Palantir is a better role model for companies that want to incorporate AI into their products but don't know how to do it.

And with Palantir's stock price soaring this week, the company's valuation is now expected to break through 100 billion dollars once again.

Of course, there are currently some market players who are wary of Palantir's high valuation. Richard Windsor, an independent analyst at Radio Free Mobile, wrote, “Another set of good results drove Palantir's share price to a new high, but this was not a blowout like the one reported by Nvidia, and its valuation index was three times that of Nvidia, and there was serious equity dilution, which meant that the money investors spent was not getting a corresponding value.”

Windsor added that he missed the opportunity to double because he sold early, but he is still very happy to enter a field of more reasonable value.