AI will keep booming while AI stocks keep collapsing. Palantir reports TODAY, and the results could explain why. A boom in AI usage doesn’t mean a boom in AI profits. And stocks trade on profits. October showed it. The Nasdaq 100 fell 5.8%+, wiping out over $2T. Chip stocks slid into a bear market. But AI usage didn’t slow down. The bill just got bigger. Look at Amazon. AWS revenue grew 39% last quarter. Demand is clearly there. But Amazon’s free cash flow over the past year was negative $42.4B, mostly because of AI infrastructure. Meta tells the same story. It spent $34.9B on capex last quarter, more than its operations brought in. That’s the problem. The companies building AI are paying for it now. The returns come later, if they come at all. So investors are selling first and asking questions later. But not every AI stock is falling. Palantir is up about 60% in three months Palantir doesn’t buy the chips or build the data centers. It sells the software that puts AI to work. Big Tech carries the cost. Palantir collects the revenue. And the revenue is real. Last quarter, US commercial revenue grew 149%. But customer count grew only 35%. That means existing clients are spending much more. Net dollar retention of 157% confirms it. And it’s profitable. GAAP operating margin hit 47%. That’s what investors want from AI: real spending, real profit. But even here, expectations are huge. Wall Street wants about $2.18B in revenue and $0.41 in adjusted EPS tonight. Roughly 85% growth would only meet the bar. Tonight, watch three things: - Are customers still spending more? - Are margins holding? - Does the Q4 outlook actually improve? The last one is a trap. Say Palantir beats Q3 by $100M and raises its full-year forecast by $100M. Sounds great. But the Q4 outlook hasn’t changed at all. Palantir isn’t bulletproof either. It fell 6.3% on Friday as the selloff spread. That’s the AI market right now. The technology is winning. The question is which shareholders get paid for it.