Wall Street’s artificial-intelligence trade regained momentum as Nvidia and Salesforce delivered strong quarterly results that sent their shares sharply higher and lifted the major U.S. stock indexes. The S&P 500 gained 0.7% Thursday to 7,730.99, the Nasdaq Composite climbed 1.6% to 26,541.35 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 105.56 points, or 0.2%, to 53,569.44.

Nvidia was the biggest force behind the market’s advance. Shares of the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker jumped 8.7% after the company reported fiscal second-quarter revenue of $96.2 billion, up 18% from the prior quarter and 106% from a year earlier. Data center revenue reached $89 billion, a 117% year-over-year increase, underscoring the continued scale of spending by cloud providers, AI developers and other customers building computing infrastructure.

Nvidia reported non-GAAP earnings of $2.22 per diluted share and maintained non-GAAP gross margins of 75%. The company projected fiscal third-quarter revenue of about $108 billion, a forecast that reinforced expectations that spending on accelerated computing remains strong despite increasing debate over how quickly customers will generate returns from enormous AI infrastructure investments.

The earnings response was notable because Nvidia’s results have become a proxy for the health of the broader AI investment cycle. The company supplies processors and networking technology used to train and operate many of the world’s largest AI systems, making its order pipeline an important indicator for technology spending. Investors have increasingly questioned whether the pace of investment by hyperscale cloud providers and AI companies can continue after several years of extraordinary expansion.

Nvidia’s latest numbers helped ease those concerns, at least temporarily. The company said demand continues to broaden across major AI laboratories, startups, enterprises, governments and developers of physical-AI systems. Nvidia is also preparing for the rollout of its Vera Rubin computing platform while building inventory and securing capacity for future demand.

Salesforce provided a second catalyst for technology shares, with its stock jumping 22.6%. The advance marked the cloud-software company’s best trading day in roughly six years and offered investors evidence that established enterprise-software providers can benefit from AI adoption rather than simply face disruption from new AI-native competitors.

Salesforce reported fiscal second-quarter revenue of $11.3 billion, up 11% from a year earlier. Subscription and support revenue rose 12% to $10.8 billion. The San Francisco company said current remaining performance obligations, a closely watched measure of contracted future revenue, reached $33.5 billion, up 14% year over year in both reported and constant-currency terms.

The company also pointed to rapid growth in its AI-related products. Annual recurring revenue from Agentforce and Data 360 reached nearly $3.9 billion, more than tripling from a year earlier, while Agentforce annual recurring revenue exceeded $1.5 billion. Salesforce said customers are increasing their use of AI agents, data tools and automated workflows across its platform.

Salesforce raised its fiscal 2027 revenue forecast to between $46.1 billion and $46.4 billion, representing expected growth of 11% to 12%. The updated outlook includes contributions from Informatica and anticipated acquisitions of Contentful and Fin, while also accounting for a stronger U.S. dollar. The company forecast third-quarter revenue of $11.42 billion to $11.5 billion.

The reaction to Salesforce was particularly important for the wider software sector. Software companies have faced investor concerns that generative AI could undermine traditional subscription models by making it easier for customers to automate tasks or develop competing applications. Salesforce’s results instead suggested that large software platforms may be able to monetize AI through premium products, data services and autonomous agents embedded in existing enterprise systems.

Salesforce also announced an expanded partnership with Anthropic, deepening the integration of Claude models with Salesforce products. The arrangement adds to a broader industry trend in which enterprise-software companies are pairing proprietary customer data and workflow systems with large language models supplied by specialized AI developers.

The technology rally was not uniform across the market. The Associated Press reported that a majority of S&P 500 stocks declined Thursday even as the capitalization-weighted index advanced. That divergence highlighted the influence of a relatively small group of large technology companies on benchmark performance.

HP fell 2.9% despite reporting quarterly profit and revenue above expectations, as investors focused on pressure from higher memory and component costs and uncertainty surrounding personal-computer demand. Best Buy dropped 4.4% even after exceeding quarterly expectations, reflecting continued concern about the financial condition of U.S. consumers facing elevated prices.

Discount retailers produced mixed reactions. Dollar General rose 2.5% after reporting stronger-than-expected profit, while Dollar Tree declined 3.9% as investors focused on its sales outlook. The contrasting moves illustrated how earnings season continues to expose sharp differences among industries even as AI-related technology companies dominate the headline indexes.

Bond markets also remained an important constraint on equity valuations. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury edged up to about 4.67% after data showed relatively low unemployment claims, reinforcing the view that the labor market remains resilient. Higher Treasury yields can pressure technology stocks because they reduce the present value investors assign to earnings expected far into the future.

For investors, the Nvidia and Salesforce reports shifted attention from the cost of AI toward evidence of monetization. Nvidia demonstrated that demand for the computing infrastructure behind AI remains exceptionally strong, while Salesforce showed that enterprise software companies are finding ways to sell AI tools directly to corporate customers.

The next test is whether those growth rates remain sustainable as comparisons become more difficult and customers scrutinize the return on AI spending. Nvidia faces the challenge of supplying increasingly expensive infrastructure while maintaining high margins, and Salesforce must demonstrate that AI adoption can translate into durable organic revenue growth rather than short-lived enthusiasm around new products.

For now, the earnings provided Wall Street with a powerful counterargument to concerns that the AI investment cycle was losing momentum. Nvidia’s hardware growth and Salesforce’s improving software demand showed two different stages of the same commercial chain: companies are still buying the computing capacity needed to develop AI, while businesses are increasingly paying for AI-enabled applications designed to produce measurable productivity gains.