Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, helps ring the Closing Bell at the New York Stock Exchange on September 30, 2025.
The NYSE
The “SaaSpocalypse” may not end. But for now, the fear of software death has cooled.
Software stocks rose this week, driven by strong earnings results Snowflake again Oktawhich shows that some companies are navigating their way through artificial intelligence disruption better than Wall Street expected.
I iShares Expanded Tech-Software Exchange Fund it rose 8% this week and closed May up 21%, the ETF’s best monthly performance since October 2001. Back then it was a brief rally during the dot-com boom, while the current rally comes as concerns about the impact of AI ripple across the sector.
Software terms have been hit hard in the past year due to the boom in code called vibe, users can now build apps and websites in minutes thanks to contributions from Anthropic, OpenAI and more.
Through this month’s session, the iShares software ETF is down just 3.8% for the year, still lagging the Nasdaq, which has gained 18% in 2026.
Data platform provider Snowflake was the biggest driver this week, logging its best day on Thursday and gaining nearly 50% in the four trading days following the Monday holiday. The company announced a $6 billion cloud and chip deal Amazon and suggested guidelines as customers gravitate toward more AI tools.
“We’re also seeing customers deploy and scale workloads at a faster pace,” CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy told analysts on the company’s earnings call.
Analysts at Argus Research called Snowflake “picks and shovels” in productive AI and raised their price target to $300 from $250. The stock closed Friday at $255.55 and is now up 17% for the year.
“We think Snowflake may be a beneficiary of GenAI development as businesses increasingly need to integrate and synchronize data, Snowflake’s core business, to take advantage of GenAI,” analysts wrote in a report after the lead.
Okta was another big winner with investors, gaining a record 30% on Friday. The company reported better-than-expected results, and said the shift to agent AI is forcing businesses to invest in identity protection tools and protect themselves against the wave of bot armies.
“AI products will take a long time, but every organization will build and deploy agents,” Okta CEO Todd McKinnon told CNBC. “It’s critical infrastructure that will be needed in the next few years.”
Elsewhere in the software space, Atlassian up 26% for the week as well Service Now increased by 20%, while Shopify, Work day again Asana each gained at least 14%.
Among the major software and cloud infrastructure vendors, The Oracle jumped 16% as well Microsoft up about 8%. However, Microsoft is still down about 7% for the year, the worst performance among tech megacaps.
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