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\u00a9 enkoff \/ iStock via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities has been one of the loudest voices calling defense AI a generational spending cycle, and his latest comments make the investment thesis more concrete. Asked about the fiscal 2026 OMB budget proposal and its increased AI spending allocations, Ives named names.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s going to be massive. I mean, look, it speaks to one of the bullet thesises with Palantir. And I think that\u2019s really the first one. If you\u2019re going to see when it comes to so many software names and tech names that are really, I think, going to be more and more integrated on the defense side. And I think it comes down to AI technology. Palantir is the first one we saw, but you\u2019re going to see Oracle, you\u2019re going to see Microsoft. You\u2019re going to see many of these other players getting a piece.<\/p>\n
Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities<\/p>\n
Ives framed the current geopolitical environment as driving a \u201cwhole new warfare\u201d paradigm that makes AI technology essential at the military level, not just in enterprise. I\u2019ve been following his AI spending thesis pretty much every week for the past two years, and this is the clearest he\u2019s been about which companies sit at the top of the defense integration stack.<\/p>\n
Palantir: The First Mover<\/p>\n
Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ:PLTR<\/a> | PLTR Price Prediction<\/a>) built its foundation on government intelligence work. Its Gotham platform is already embedded inside defense and intelligence workflows, which is why Ives calls it the first mover. The numbers back that up: U.S. Government revenue hit $570M in Q4 2025, up 66% year over year, while total Q4 revenue reached $1.407B, up 70% YoY. CEO Alex Karp has been direct about the positioning: \u201cWe are an n of 1\u2026Palantir is alone in choosing to exclusively focus on scaling the operational leverage made possible by the rapid advancements of AI models.\u201d<\/p>\n The company is guiding for FY2026 revenue of $7.182B to $7.198B, roughly 61% growth year over year. At a trailing P\/E of 239x and forward P\/E of 115x, the valuation prices in a lot of that optimism. The stock is down about 16% year to date even as the one-year return sits at nearly 70%. Reddit sentiment has turned bearish to very bearish in recent weeks, which tells me retail investors are getting impatient with the valuation even as the fundamental story keeps strengthening.<\/p>\n Oracle: Infrastructure at Scale<\/p>\n Oracle (NYSE:ORCL<\/a>) is building the plumbing. Cloud infrastructure revenue grew 84% year over year to $4.888B in its most recent quarter, and all top five AI models now run in Oracle Cloud. The company\u2019s remaining performance obligations stand at $553B, up 325% year over year signals demand far outpacing what\u2019s on the income statement. Oracle is down about 25% year to date, well below its 52-week high of $344.21, creating an interesting entry point for investors who believe the infrastructure buildout thesis holds. The forward P\/E of 18x is a fraction of Palantir\u2019s multiple for a company growing cloud revenue at a comparable pace.<\/p>\n Microsoft: The Pentagon\u2019s Cloud Partner<\/p>\n Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT<\/a>) brings the enterprise relationships and Pentagon contract history. Azure grew 39% year over year last quarter, and the company holds a roughly 27% stake in OpenAI<\/a> with $250B in Azure services contracted. CEO Satya Nadella captured the scale of what\u2019s being built: \u201cWe are only at the beginning phases of AI diffusion and already Microsoft has built an AI business that is larger than some of our biggest franchises.\u201d At a forward P\/E of 20x and with 58 analyst Buy or Strong Buy ratings against zero Sells, Microsoft carries the broadest institutional support of the three.<\/p>\n Ives\u2019 core argument: defense AI spending is a structural budget line, not a pilot program. Palantir owns the software layer, Oracle is building the cloud infrastructure underneath it, and Microsoft provides the enterprise backbone and AI models on top. If you think the OMB\u2019s AI budget priorities hold through the next spending cycle, that stack is worth understanding before the contracts get announced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a9 enkoff \/ iStock via Getty Images Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities has been one of the loudest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":568231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-568230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}