Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the megatrend of this decade and is fast transforming the enterprise landscape. According to Gartner, global AI spending will be nearly $1.5 trillion in calendar year 2025.
While the AI opportunity is massive, not every AI player can prove to be an exceptional business in the long run. Companies with proven technologies and well-established customer bases stand a better chance of sustaining high top-line and bottom-line growth rates in the coming years.
Here's why Palantir Technologies (PLTR +2.40%) and Snowflake (SNOW +0.09%) are two companies that could deliver strong returns, turning disciplined investors into millionaires over the long run.
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Palantir
Palantir has evolved from a pure data analytics company to a full-stack AI enterprise platform. The company's software solutions are now used in mission-critical operations by both government and commercial clients.
In the second quarter, the company's revenue soared 48% year over year to over $1 billion. The U.S. continues to be the biggest market, with revenue growing 68% to $733 million. The company also closed a record $2.27 billion in total contract value, up 140% over the year-ago period.
A significant part of this growth is driven by the rapid enterprise adoption of the company's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP). AIP combines large language model reasoning with the company's proprietary ontology framework (used to relate physical assets to digital twins) to solve complex, real-time business challenges.
NASDAQ: PLTR
Key Data Points
Palantir is also focused on helping clients scale through automation. The company has added new tools and features to AIP, such as AI Forward Deployed Engineer (software engineer) and AI Workbench, to automate application development tasks and develop, debug, and automate workflows.
The company has also introduced the Ontology-as-a-Code feature to enable clients to leverage ontology in their preferred integrated development environments, tools, and workflows.
Palantir's shares are currently trading at a very aggressive valuation of over 123 times sales. Although not an ideal scenario, this premium reflects Wall Street's confidence in the company's future growth trajectory.
Analysts expect Palantir's revenue to rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 39.9% from $2.86 billion in fiscal 2024 to $11 billion in fiscal 2028. Adjusted earnings per share (EPS) are also expected to grow at a CAGR of 40.7% from $0.41 in fiscal 2024 to $1.61 in fiscal 2028. Hence, the valuation can continue to remain elevated for several more years.
Considering these factors, Palantir can prove to be a smart pick in 2025.
Snowflake
Snowflake is transitioning from a cloud data warehouse to an AI data cloud (unified platform comprising AI technologies, data, and applications) for enterprises.
In Q2 of fiscal 2026 (ended July 31, 2025), product revenue grew 32% year over year to $1.09 billion, while non-GAAP operating margin reached 11%. The company had $6.9 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO) at the end of Q2, up 33% on a year-over-year basis. With a large base of renewing customers, contracted billings, and large deals in the pipeline, the company has strong revenue visibility for the next few years. Snowflake's healthy net-revenue retention rate of 125% also demonstrates its success in cross-selling and upselling to existing clients.
AI has become the key growth engine, influencing almost half of all new customer wins in Q2. AI is also powering nearly 25% of the deployed use cases. Currently, over 6,100 accounts use Snowflake's AI capabilities on a weekly basis for various activities such as data migrations, analytics, and workflow transformations.
NYSE: SNOW
Key Data Points
Snowflake has further strengthened its position in enterprise AI with Snowflake Intelligence, which enables enterprises to interact directly with their data and also build intelligent agents. The company has introduced Cortex AI SQL, which enables users to leverage AI models directly within SQL databases. This removes the need to move data between applications and unifies analytics and AI.
The company is also committed to improving performance and efficiency. The company launched Gen2 data warehouses , which offer double the performance in extracting insights and managing data without increasing costs. The company's new OpenFlow capability allows enterprises to bring unstructured, structured, batch, or real-time streaming data into the Snowflake platform.
All these AI-powered capabilities have accelerated the company's customer acquisition pace. Snowflake added 533 new customers in Q2, including 15 Global 2000 companies. The company now is trading at 19.4 times sales, which is not cheap for a loss-making company. However, the premium seems justified when we consider its accelerating AI adoption, expanding customer base, and robust backlog.
Hence, the payoff in investing in Snowflake can be impressive despite its elevated valuation levels.
