Salesforce leads software rally, rocketing 20% on track for second-best day ever

Shares of Salesforce jumped more than 20% Thursday after the company reported a beat on second-quarter earnings and announced an expanded partnership with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. The stock is on pace for its second-best day ever, trailing only August 2020, when shares jumped roughly 26%. CEO Mark Benioff and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined CNBC to unveil a plugin called "Claudeforce," which is built to help salespeople access critical data through the frontier lab's Claude chatbot. The AI expansion fueled optimism and helped lift software names like Adobe, Palantir, Servicenow, Autodesk and Figma, which all rallied. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF climbed roughly 5% Software stocks have taken a hit this year on fears that generative artificial intelligence could disrupt the software-as-a-service, or SaaS, business model. "This is not the SaaSpocalypse," Benioff said on Wednesday's earnings call. "We've been hearing about this for last two quarters, these dire predictions about the end of software and how the models eat everything, but none of them have come true for us." Salesforce posted revenue of $11.35 billion, versus $11.32 billion that LSEG analysts expected. That was up 11% year-over-year. The software company reported adjusted earnings per share at $5.90, sailing past estimates of $3.27 a share. Net income rose 87% from a year ago, coming in at $3.53 billion, or $4.29 a share, versus last year's $1.89 billion, or $1.96 a share. The company also noted a $2.6 billion gain from its strategic investment in Anthropic, whose valuation has now grown to $965 billion ahead of its hotly-anticipated initial public offering.