Shares of Palantir Technologies were up 8% in late-trading on Monday after the company reported strong second-quarter earnings results.

This is breaking news. Read a preview of Palantir's earnings below and check back for more analysis soon.

The setup for Palantir's second-quarter earnings on Monday afternoon is the same as it's been for a year now. The software company has produced high and accelerating sales and profit growth, and investors want to know how long that rocket flight can last before it runs out of fuel.

Investors seemed optimistic as the stock rose more than 3% ahead of the open.

Last quarter the company saw sales growth of 85% to $1.6 billion. Adjusted operating margin rose to 60% from 44% the year before. This quarter, the Wall Street consensus is that both sales growth and margin will begin to fall off.

Revenue is seen at $1.8 billion, rising by 81% from the previous year, with operating margin beginning a slow decline for the rest of the year.

Palantir's strength is in the U.S. Its first customers were in the U.S. government, and many parts of the executive branch have contracts with Palantir, especially in defense and intelligence agencies.

Its software is also widespread in state and local governments. Last quarter U.S. government revenue was up 84% from the year before.

But where Palantir is getting the most traction lately is in U.S. commercial revenue, a much larger potential market. Palantir takes all the disparate data an enterprise creates, and combines them into a structured "data lake," which the company calls an Ontology.

On top of Ontology, Palantir builds custom applications to tackle specific data issues, and to use AI to draw connections and surface hidden relationships.

Medium-size and larger firms in the U.S. are beginning to come around to this sort of data wrangling, when the most valuable layer to effective AI implementation is proprietary corporate data. Sales to U.S. commercial customers were up 133% last quarter. U.S. government revenue was still larger, but that may flip in the second quarter.

But outside the U.S., vocal and controversial CEO Alex Karp and the company's unorthodox sales process haven't played as well. While sales to U.S. customers doubled last quarter, international revenue rose by 37%. That's still very healthy, but it weighs on the company's long-term potential.

Though it still trades at high valuation multiples, the stock is down 31% this year, swept up in the bearish narrative that AI will replace a lot of business software, and the idea that the company's sales growth and profit margins are peaking. Even after routing Wall Street expectations last quarter, the stock was down 6.9% the next day.