Jim Cramer says Nvidia and Salesforce earnings upended two bear narratives

CNBC's Jim Cramer on Thursday said strong earnings results from Nvidia and Salesforce shattered two of Wall Street's biggest tech bear narratives, sending both stocks soaring.

"We were in the grip of some lies and damn lies, backed by chimerical statistics, and now both bear stories backfired," the "Mad Money" host said. "Today was a day where a lot of wrongs were rectified. In particular, I'm talking about the canards coloring the action in Salesforce and Nvidia."

Shares of Salesforce and Nvidia surged 22% and 8%, respectively, after both reported better-than-expected quarterly results Wednesday evening. Cramer said the reports forced investors to rethink many of the concerns that had weighed on both stocks.

For Salesforce, investors have worried that increasingly capable AI models could allow businesses to accomplish more with fewer traditional software subscriptions, undermining the industry's pricing model. Despite rallying over the past month, Salesforce was still down 22% for the year heading into the print. Thursday's rally erased much of that decline.

However, Cramer said the software giant delivered its strongest sales growth in four years, with seats across its sales, service, and Slack products growing year over year. Customer attrition remained near historic lows, and bookings for its AI-focused bundles more than doubled from the prior quarter, he said.

Salesforce's expanding partnership with Anthropic further undercut the bear case, according to Cramer. The AI company, once viewed as a potential threat to traditional software providers, teamed up with Salesforce on Claudeforce, which will allow Claude users to tap Salesforce data to perform tasks such as composing emails and updating records.

Cramer said Nvidia's results challenged an even broader collection of concerns, including slowing hyperscaler demand, competition from custom chips, rapidly depreciating GPUs, potential delays to its Vera Rubin platform and risks surrounding its financing of AI customers.

"And what happened? What you just heard was entirely wrong," Cramer said.

He pointed to Nvidia's increasingly diversified customer base, with hyperscalers now accounting for roughly half of its business and sovereign AI projects, neoclouds and other customers making up the rest. Cramer noted the Vera Rubin, the company's next-generation AI chip, also remains on schedule, while CEO Jensen Huang said older Nvidia infrastructure can remain productive for years as software improvements enhance its performance.

Amazon offered another counterpoint to the bear case, he said. Despite developing its own AI chips, Amazon Web Services plans to buy 2 million Nvidia GPUs and potentially millions of its new Vera CPUs. Cramer said that commitment underscores why Nvidia demand remains strong: customers are finding they can quickly make money from its computing power.

Most important, Cramer said, was Nvidia's outlook. The company indicated revenue could grow roughly 70% in fiscal 2028, well above the roughly 45% Wall Street had expected, reflecting growing confidence and visibility into AI demand.

For Cramer, the rallies illustrated the danger of letting popular narratives overshadow what companies are actually delivering.

"The short-pocalypse hedge funds got annihilated by Salesforce and Nvidia," he said. "If you listened to me and just owned these stocks ... you had a phenomenal day."

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