Snowflake commits $6B to AWS for Graviton CPUs as AI infrastructure spending accelerates

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Cloud data storage company Snowflake has signed a $6 billion five-year commitment with Amazon Web Services, focusing on Graviton CPUs and AI accelerators. The deal represents a 2.4x increase from Snowflake's 2023 AWS agreement and signals the growing importance of CPU capacity for AI agents. Snowflake's stock surged 25-38% following the announcement and strong Q1 earnings.

Snowflake AWS Deal Marks Largest Expansion in 11-Year Partnership

Cloud data storage company Snowflake has committed to spend $6 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next five years, the companies announced Wednesday

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. The Snowflake $6 billion commitment to AWS represents the largest expansion of their relationship since Snowflake was founded in 2012 and built its platform atop AWS infrastructure

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. For context, Snowflake has sold $7 billion worth of its services via AWS Marketplace total since its inception, making this new agreement nearly equivalent to all the revenue it has ever generated through that channel

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Source: PYMNTS

Source: PYMNTS

The trajectory of Snowflake's AWS spending illustrates the accelerating demand for AI infrastructure. At its 2020 IPO, Snowflake disclosed a $1.2 billion five-year commitment to AWS

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. That figure climbed to $2.5 billion in 2023

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. The new $6 billion agreement is roughly five times the 2020 commitment and 2.4 times the 2023 one, implying an average annual spend of $1.2 billion

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. Snowflake can justify this spending because its customers are accelerating their own AWS expenditures, doubling their spending in 2025 to $2 billion for that calendar year

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Graviton CPUs Take Center Stage in AI Infrastructure Strategy

The agreement focuses specifically on Amazon's custom silicon and GPUs for AI, with particular emphasis on Graviton CPUs

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. Snowflake plans to expand its use of Amazon's Graviton general-purpose chips, which are Arm-based CPU processors designed to replace x86 chips from Intel and AMD at substantially better price-performance

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. Over the past few years, Snowflake has shifted an increasing amount of compute from Intel and AMD CPUs to Amazon's own Graviton instances

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Source: ET

Source: ET

Now in their fifth generation, Amazon's latest Graviton processors pack 192 Arm Neoverse V3 cores fed by 12 channels of memory up to 8800 MT/s

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. Snowflake committing to run its data-cloud workloads on Graviton CPUs at scale represents a meaningful endorsement of the Arm-server thesis that has been quietly reshaping cloud-infrastructure economics for five years

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. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy boasted last month that Amazon's homegrown AI chips offer "better price-performance" than Nvidia's offerings, and Amazon says it passes those savings along to its customers

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CPU Demand Surges as AI Agents Drive Computing Requirements

The renewed focus on CPUs stems from the operational reality of AI agents. As AI moves from training to daily usage to automation via agents, CPU usage skyrockets

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. While GPUs handle training and reasoning, CPUs handle most of the rest of the tasks associated with AI, particularly agents. The models themselves still run on GPUs, but the tools and functions those models call—a SQL query or Python script, for example—do not

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. This has driven renewed demand for CPU cores as each agent's performance is inherently limited by how quickly the processor can service the request

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Source: CXOToday

Source: CXOToday

Under the agreement, Snowflake will run and train its generative AI models and cloud services using a combination of GPUs running in AWS and Graviton CPU cores

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. Snowflake has been offering its AI building tool, Cortex AI, for a couple of years now, and the platform can convert natural language to SQL queries, summarize data, and conduct sentiment analysis

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. The tool makes sense because Snowflake is where much of an enterprise's data lives, enabling cloud-based data warehousing customers to bring AI directly to governed data

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AWS Secures Multiple Billion-Dollar AI Infrastructure Commitments

The Snowflake deal adds to AWS's growing roster of large-scale AI infrastructure agreements. In April, Anthropic said it aims to spend over $100 billion on AWS over a decade

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. Amazon also has a deal with OpenAI worth $138 billion

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. Both agreements with the AI model companies include an equity investment, while the Snowflake AWS deal does not

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. Last month, Meta revealed plans to deploy tens of millions of Amazon's Graviton 5 CPU cores, making the social network one of the biggest consumers of AWS's homegrown silicon

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Amazon's custom chips business has become a major revenue driver, generating more than $20 billion a year and growing at triple-digit rates, according to Jassy's April shareholder letter

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. Demand is so high that two large customers asked to buy all of Amazon's available Graviton capacity for 2026, and the company was compelled to turn them down

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. These multi-billion-dollar cloud deals show how AI is lifting AWS's prospects, and the company's capacity to absorb $6 billion of additional five-year demand against an already-stretched data-centre pipeline indicates how rapidly Amazon is bringing new capacity online

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Market Response and Competitive Implications for AI Chip Development

Snowflake's stock surged 25% to 38% in extended trading Wednesday following the announcement and strong Q1 fiscal-2027 earnings

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. The company reported 39 cents in adjusted earnings per share on $1.39 billion in revenue, beating analyst expectations of 32 cents per share and $1.32 billion in revenue

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. AWS Marketplace sales for Snowflake doubled year-on-year to $2 billion in 2025, suggesting the integration logic is already working commercially

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These deals serve as notice to Nvidia that competitive CPUs from cloud giants are attempting to challenge its position. Google has also been making its own AI chips for years, and Microsoft launched its Maia AI chip in January

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. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last week he's ready to defend and grow his turf, proclaiming that the new AI-specific CPU his company developed, called Vera, represents a "brand new" $200 billion market for Nvidia, with $20 billion already sold

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. Snowflake's deeper AWS commitment, including the explicit Graviton anchor, signals a strategic bet: pick the larger hyperscaler partner and accept the implicit single-cloud tilt, rather than pursuing the multi-cloud agnosticism strategy favored by competitors like Databricks. Whether that approach pays off against diversification strategies is the multi-year question facing agentic enterprise platforms.

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