Amazon, Palantir tipped as AI software buys over Nvidia

The article's framing is a deliberate reframe of where AI money is made. Rather than the chipmakers that dominate AI investing attention, it points to the software layer supporting the market's expansion, and it picks two very different profiles for that trade. Amazon is presented as the balanced option: a company that still earns most revenue from retail but most operating profit from AWS, whose growth in turn subsidizes the lower-margin retail business.

Palantir is the aggressive option. The article recounts that it declared in its S-1 filing it would become the "default operating system for data across the U.S. government," and that most U.S. government agencies already use its Gotham platform, while Amazon, Walmart and Apple use Foundry. Its Artificial Intelligence Platform, launched in 2023, connects large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude directly to aggregated data, which the article describes as connective tissue rather than just backbone.

The stakes turn on whether the analyst growth expectations materialize and whether investors accept the valuations attached to them. Palantir's premium multiple looks like the sharper test: the article notes it expects its U.S. commercial business to keep growing faster than government, and that military conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine are expected to push the U.S. military to use Gotham more for mission planning and testing.