Snowflake commits $200 million to OpenAI in multi-year enterprise AI partnership

What Snowflake's deal with OpenAI tells us about the enterprise AI race | TechCrunch

Cloud data company Snowflake has entered into a $200 million multi-year AI deal with OpenAI on Monday, the latest signal that enterprise AI competition continues to heat up. Under the deal, Snowflake's 12,600 customers will have access to OpenAI models across all three major cloud providers. Snowflake employees access to OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise as well. The two companies are also partnering to build new AI agents and other AI products. "By bringing OpenAI models to enterprise data, Snowflake enables organizations to build and deploy AI on top of their most valuable asset using the secure, governed platform they already trust," Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said in a press release. "Customers can now harness all their enterprise knowledge in Snowflake together with the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models, enabling them to build AI agents that are powerful, responsible, and trustworthy. Together, we're setting a new standard for AI innovation, helping businesses transform with confidence, while maintaining strong security and compliance standards." OpenAI declined to share information on the deal beyond the press release. If this deal feels familiar, it should. Snowflake announced a $200 million enterprise deal with AI research lab Anthropic at the beginning of December. At the time, Ramaswamy was quoted making very similar comments about how the partnership with Anthropic would give its customers access to powerful AI models on top of their existing data. "Our partnership with OpenAI is a multi-year commercial commitment focused on reliability, performance, and real customer usage. At the same time, we remain intentionally model-agnostic. Enterprises need choice, and we do not believe in locking customers into a single provider," Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake told TechCrunch over email. "OpenAI is an important partner, and it is one of several frontier model providers available on Snowflake today, alongside Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others. Snowflake isn't the only enterprise signing sizable deals with multiple AI companies either. In January, workflow automation platform ServiceNow announced multi-year deals with both OpenAI and Anthropic for very similar reasons as Snowflake. ServiceNow president, COO and CPO Amit Zavery told TechCrunch at the time that working with both AI labs was deliberate because they wanted to give their customers and employees the ability to choose which model they wanted based on the task at hand. It's hard to pinpoint which AI companies are seeing the most enterprise adoption success thus far. A Menlo Ventures survey from late 2025 shows its portfolio company Anthropic holds a commanding market lead; an Andreessen Horowitz report from last week naturally found its portfolio company OpenAI is leading the pack. These conflicting surveys make it difficult to accurately track enterprise AI usage trends. However, this latest string of deals does provide a short-term view of what enterprise AI adoption will look like. The upshot: enterprises will continue to strike partnerships with multiple AI companies because each one offers large language models with varying strengths and weaknesses. Enterprises are likely going to partner with multiple AI players because different AI companies and their large language models come with their own strengths and weaknesses. Enterprise AI could easily become a market that contains several winners with an overlapping customer base, similar to how many ride-hail users swap between Lyft and Uber based on what makes the most sense for that moment. Case in point: employees of these enterprises already use their preferred model regardless of their company contracts. Or maybe there will be a clear winner after all. But for now, it's likely we are going to see enterprises ink deals with multiple players as they continue to hunt for where AI can deliver tangible value.

Snowflake spends $200M to bring OpenAI to customers

Cuts out the Azure middleman with multi-year deal for 'tighter alignment' Snowflake plans to spend as much as $200 million with OpenAI to bring its models and chatbot into the database vendor's sandbox and toolset. Features such as Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence will get a boost from the house of Altman. "Snowflake is committing up to $200 million to purchase access to OpenAI's frontier models and ChatGPT Enterprise over the course of the multi-year agreement," Baris Gultekin, Snowflake's vice president of AI, told The Register. "This reflects Snowflake's conviction that providing OpenAI technology to our enterprise customer base, at scale and with enterprise-grade reliability, is strategically important. It is a commercial commitment anchored in real AI consumption by Snowflake customers, not a speculative or symbolic partnership." Snowflake has previously allowed users of its data analytics and storage platform to access OpenAI through integration with Microsoft Azure, a service announced last year. This new integration lets them gain OpenAI's capabilities through Cortex AI as well as Snowflake Intelligence, giving them the ability to query and process their own data using natural language prompts. "Snowflake customers have been able to use OpenAI models before, but this partnership is different in that it's a direct, first-party partnership with OpenAI, rather than mediated through a cloud provider," Gultekin told The Register. "As a result, it establishes deep, first-party integration of OpenAI's frontier models directly into Snowflake's governed AI platform, paired with a multi-year commercial commitment that ensures reliability, performance, roadmap, and GTM alignment." Under the terms of the partnership, Snowflake and OpenAI engineering teams will now partner to bring new features to customers that leverage OpenAI Apps SDKs, AgentKit, and APIs that support shared enterprise workflows. "With this new direct relationship established, the Snowflake and OpenAI teams can establish much tighter alignment across go-to-market efforts and co-innovation," Gultekin said. This also brings OpenAI and ChatGPT 5.2 to Snowflake's two AI features that help users navigate their data: Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence. With Cortex AI, which includes Cortex Code, users can tap into the latest OpenAI models to analyze data. From rows and columns to text, images, and audio, teams can explore it all seamlessly using SQL, the familiar language of data they already trust. Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake's executive vice president of product, told The Register that Cortex Code is a data-native AI coding agent that enables users to build, operate, and optimize data and AI workflows on Snowflake using natural language. It works directly with enterprise data, metadata, governance policies, and compute to generate executable outputs such as SQL, Python, data pipelines, ML workflows, and agent logic. He said Snowflake Intelligence is focused on data insights and decision-making. It allows users, especially non-technical users, to ask natural language questions and receive answers grounded in governed enterprise data and semantic models. Rather than creating new pipelines or applications, Snowflake Intelligence helps users explore and act on what already exists in their data environment. "Cortex Code emphasizes reliability in building by producing inspectable, executable workflows that can be tested, validated, and deployed. Snowflake Intelligence emphasizes reliability in answering by grounding responses in enterprise data, metadata, RBAC, and semantic definitions," Kleinerman told The Register. "Together, Cortex Code enables teams to build trusted data and AI workflows, and Snowflake Intelligence enables users to ask questions and make decisions directly from governed enterprise data." ®

Snowflake partners with OpenAI in $200 million AI deal

Feb 2 (Reuters) - Snowflake (SNOW.N), opens new tab said on Monday it has entered a $200 million partnership with OpenAI to integrate advanced artificial intelligence models directly into its cloud data platform, as enterprises increasingly turn to AI to extract insights from vast troves of data. Cloud data platforms, where companies store much of their most valuable and sensitive information, are emerging as a key battleground for generative AI businesses. By embedding AI models directly into these platforms, vendors aim to let enterprises analyze data, search internal documents and automate tasks more easily, while preserving strict data security and governance controls. Under the deal, Snowflake and the ChatGPT maker will develop AI agents capable of handling complex workflows, allowing users to ask questions in natural language and receive answers drawn from company data without writing code. The partnership reflects a broader shift among enterprises, which are moving from experimenting with basic AI chatbots to deploying integrated agents that can work directly with proprietary data, increasingly prioritizing systems that combine automation with tighter oversight. Snowflake said the partnership expands earlier collaboration between the two companies by making OpenAI's models available within Snowflake across all three major cloud providers, rather than primarily through Microsoft Azure. Several customers, including design platform Canva and fitness wearable maker WHOOP, are already using the joint offering to speed up research, analytics and internal decision-making, according to the cloud data platform. The announcement comes amid intensifying competition in the data and AI market. Rival Databricks has continued to scale aggressively, recently raising $4 billion at a $134 billion valuation to fund its "Agentbricks" framework and a growing suite of AI products. Reporting by Anhata Rooprai and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Jonathan Ananda Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Snowflake and OpenAI forge $200M enterprise AI partnership

The deal embeds advanced OpenAI models directly into Snowflake's data platform, enabling secure, AI-powered analytics and agents across major clouds. Snowflake and OpenAI have struck a multi-year, $200 million partnership to bring OpenAI's advanced models, including GPT-5.2, directly into Snowflake's enterprise data platform. The collaboration is designed to let Snowflake's large customer base, more than 12,000 organisations, build AI agents and semantic analytics tools that operate on their own data without moving it outside Snowflake's governed environment. Under the agreement, OpenAI models will be natively embedded in Snowflake Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence, making it possible to run queries, derive insights, and deploy AI-powered workflows using natural language interfaces and context-aware agents. Customers can analyse structured and unstructured data, automate complex tasks, and build applications grounded in enterprise data without needing extensive coding. The deal expands Snowflake's AI strategy beyond simple model access. By embedding these frontier models directly into its platform and making them available across major cloud providers, Snowflake aims to reduce the friction of AI adoption for large enterprises. Canva and WHOOP, among others, are already exploring how integrated agentic AI can speed up analytics and decision-making. Snowflake's stock reacted positively on the news, with shares climbing modestly following the announcement, as markets interpreted the agreement as a sign the data cloud provider is sharpening its competitive edge in an increasingly AI-centric landscape. This partnership reflects a broader shift in enterprise AI beyond one-off integrations or bolt-on features. Instead, it signals a move toward platforms that combine governed data infrastructure with scalable generative AI models, helping businesses unlock insights and automate workflows without jeopardising security or compliance. Competitors such as Databricks are also intensifying their AI tooling efforts, underscoring how crucial native model access and data-centric AI capabilities have become in the enterprise race.

Snowflake bets on platform-native AI as enterprises rethink custom development - SiliconANGLE

Snowflake bets on platform-native AI as enterprises rethink custom development Snowflake Inc. today detailed a sweeping set of product updates aimed at accelerating enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence, positioning its platform as a foundation for building, governing and operating AI systems directly on enterprise data rather than as an experimentation layer bolted onto existing infrastructure. The announcements, timed around the company's Build 2026 event in London, span AI-assisted development, machine learning operations, data governance, open data interoperability and transactional workloads. They reflect what Snowflake executives said is a shift from AI pilots to production systems that must meet enterprise requirements for reliability, security and compliance. "Even after many years of advancements in data technology, we still hear customers struggling with data that is siloed, the complexity of managing infrastructure, and how to deliver data insights with maximum security, governance and compliance and regulatory controls," said Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake's executive vice president of product. Today's most significant announcement is the general availability of Cortex Code, an AI coding agent designed for data-centric workflows on Snowflake. Unlike general-purpose coding assistants, Cortex Code is trained to understand Snowflake's data models, governance constructs and operational semantics, the company said. "It's different because it's a coding assistant focused on data operations, data pipelines and data transformations, and it has a lot of the enterprise data context that organizations have," Kleinerman said. Cortex Code will be available both as an embedded interface within Snowflake's Snowsight console and as a command-line interface that works with local development environments. The CLI version was not previously announced. Kleinerman said early usage inside Snowflake has shown dramatic productivity gains. "We think it's a massive nonlinear productivity improvement in how data operations are done," he said. Snowflake also outlined updates aimed at streamlining the full lifecycle of AI and machine learning development. Snowflake Notebooks, now built directly on a Jupyter kernel, are designed to support end-to-end data science workflows while maintaining Snowflake's security and governance controls. Kleinerman said customer feedback drove the adoption of the Jupyter Kernel. "The most common feedback we got from customers was the desire to be more compatible with Jupyter," he said. The company is also bringing online feature serving and model inference into general availability, enabling low-latency, real-time AI applications. To address governance, particularly around semantic consistency for AI agents, Snowflake is also introducing Semantic View Autopilot, an AI-powered service that automates the creation and maintenance of semantic views. The system draws on query history and existing business intelligence models to keep semantic definitions aligned over time, reducing manual effort and the risk of inconsistent AI outputs. Semantic consistency ensures that the same business terms are used across reports, dashboards, AI agents, applications and users. Kleinerman said it has emerged as a major limiting factor for enterprise AI. "The quality of results Snowflake Intelligence provides is a function of how good the semantic view is," he said. "The semantic view autopilot accelerates the creation and iteration of semantic views based on the needs of customers." Snowflake is introducing new features in its Snowflake Intelligence conversational, agentic application while emphasizing its role as the primary interface for business users, distinguishing it from Cortex Code's developer-focused approach. New capabilities include saving and sharing insights and expanded access to open data formats such as Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake. Kleinerman said Snowflake has yet to lose a competitive evaluation involving Snowflake Intelligence. "It's not just the vision, but also the realization that in customers' hands, with customers' data, Snowflake Intelligence is performing extremely well," he said. Snowflake Postgres, the open-source database picked up with its acquisition of Crunchy Data Solutions Inc. last summer, is now generally available. It allows enterprises to run PostgreSQL-compatible workloads natively within Snowflake's platform. The bulk of the road from preview to general availability involved making Postgres a "good citizen" within Snowflake's environment, Kleinerman said, citing integration with authentication, encryption and business continuity features. PostgreSQL has consistently been one of the most highly rated database management systems by database administrators and developers. Kleinerman positioned Snowflake Postgres as complementary to UniStore, Snowflake's transactional storage engine. "If a customer wants compatibility with Postgres, then the answer is Snowflake Postgres," he said. "If a customer wants low latency writes, [online transaction processing]-type activity with compatibility with Snowflake, the answer is UniStore." A persistent theme across today's announcements is openness, particularly around data formats and interoperability. Snowflake is integrating Apache Iceberg representational state transfer interfaces into its Horizon Catalog while continuing to support open-source Polaris. "We have zero interest in creating artificial lock-in for our customers," Kleinerman said. "I want customers using Snowflake because they want to, not because the migration off of Snowflake is too expensive." He said that philosophy extends to data sharing, with Snowflake expanding support for open formats and cross-cloud access. Another current in the product updates is a shift in how Snowflake sees enterprise AI adoption. Kleinerman said many customers are moving away from building bespoke AI systems to adopting platform-native, managed AI capabilities integrated into their existing data environments. "Most companies that we engage with are shifting to the original Snowflake promise, which is we don't want customers spending time on the infrastructure," he said. But he cautioned against expecting to see fully autonomous AI systems in the near term. "Trying to get solutions where AI takes on an entire problem and solves it is much harder than providing smaller use cases with a human in the loop," he said.

Snowflake Build 2026 - the race to prove AI investments aren't wasted money

Enterprises are pouring money into AI, but many are struggling to show returns. With global AI spending set to hit $2.52 trillion this year - a 44% jump according to Gartner - the pressure is mounting on CIOs to demonstrate value or risk budget cuts. Snowflake sees an opening. At its Build event for developers in London, the data platform specialist made its pitch that organizations will get better results by using AI-enabled tools from trusted providers rather than building everything from scratch - the hope being that IT leaders will rely on proven partners over experimental in-house projects. Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake's VP of product, outlined a raft of new tools and an OpenAI partnership designed to help customers move faster. At Build, the company showcased roughly 100 new launches from the quarter, focused on simplifying data workflows from storage through to consumption. In his keynote, Kleinerman was blunt about the urgency: If you're thinking that AI is something you'll do in the next fiscal year, next quarter, next month, or next week, you're behind, because companies are getting value from AI today. A lot of what we do at Snowflake to innovate is to help you adopt AI more easily with less friction and to do it faster. The Build announcements centered on collapsing the time between AI project conception and live deployment. Snowflake's approach: give developers collaborative tools that handle the infrastructure complexity. The centerpiece is Shared Workspaces, an evolution of the company's existing Workspaces interface. Teams can now collaborate on building production-ready AI services within a unified environment, with role-based security baked in from the start. Snowflake is also embedding AI into its own tooling. Kleinerman pointed to Cortex Code, now generally available, as a significant example. The data-native coding agent automates enterprise development tasks, trained on Snowflake's own engineering practices and customer feedback: What coding assistants have done for programming, software development, and software engineering, we're bringing that same paradigm to database management, database operations, and database programming. The tool handles tasks like building data pipelines, managing governance, and creating access policies - the kind of repetitive work that slows down data teams. Snowflake also launched Semantic View Autopilot, an AI service that learns from user behavior to maintain accurate business logic. Rather than manual data modeling, the tool taps into Snowflake's query history to suggest relationships and optimize semantic views automatically: We leverage knowledge that is unique to Snowflake about how you are using your data. We plug into things like query history and make recommendations, saying, 'Hey, these are relationships that should be included.' The goal is to help you accelerate the deployment of AI in your enterprise. The proof, as ever, is in customer implementations. IAG Loyalty is using Snowflake's ML capabilities across its membership lifecycle, powering recommendation and personalization models for Avios members. Neha Patel, lead machine-learning engineer at IAG Loyalty, said moving their ML platform architecture onto Snowflake eliminated operational headaches while providing a single source of truth for customer data: Snowflake takes away lots of operational overheads and gives us reliability, which we need to run loyalty experiences at scale. The technology provides several first-class ML capabilities. This gives us a seamless and familiar development experience, as we work with Python a lot, while also keeping model outputs trusted. At Booking.com, the challenge was different: data specialists were drowning in basic business queries, leaving little time for strategic analytics. Kiran Kodandoor, principal software engineer, said the answer came through Cortex and Snowflake Intelligence, which lets users query enterprise data in natural language. After a successful proof-of-concept, Booking.com rolled out the agent in phases. The next step is moving from insights to automated action: We want to take it to the next level, where we want to drive insights to action. We configure the agent to perform specific tasks, and we also have plans to integrate this technology with our internal knowledge base. Ahead of Build, Snowflake announced a $200 million partnership with OpenAI, bringing advanced model capabilities directly into its platform through co-innovation work. OpenAI models will be accessible within Snowflake Intelligence, creating a tighter integration between enterprise data and frontier AI. Ashley Kramer, OpenAI's VP of enterprise, framed the partnership around trust rather than technical capability: We're at a moment where AI is about trust, not the technology. The technology is there, and there's responsibility on OpenAI, Snowflake, and our customers. Our partnership with Snowflake allows us to bring governed data into the models in a secure way so you can be comfortable and trust the technology. Kramer acknowledged that effective agent deployment can eliminate mundane work, but stressed that explainability and data governance can't be afterthoughts. The challenge, she said, is closing the gap between what's technically possible and what enterprises are actually extracting: There's a huge value gap between what models can provide and the value that enterprises are extracting. And so, we want to help remove those barriers, to get you to deploy faster. Boards want ROI from AI. With generative AI in the trough and agentic AI at peak hype level, IT professionals and business leaders must start delivering. Snowflake believes that AI-enabled tools allied to its broad data platform will give organizations a head start. For end users and their tech providers, the race to value delivery is very much on.

Snowflake grants 12,600 customers access to OpenAI models

Snowflake announced a $200 million multi-year AI deal with OpenAI on Monday. The agreement provides Snowflake's 12,600 customers access to OpenAI models across all three major cloud providers. Snowflake employees gain access to OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise. The companies will collaborate to build new AI agents and other AI products. The partnership integrates OpenAI models directly with enterprise data stored in Snowflake. Customers can deploy AI applications using their data on Snowflake's platform, which emphasizes security and governance. This setup allows organizations to combine their enterprise knowledge in Snowflake with OpenAI's intelligence. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy stated in a press release, "By bringing OpenAI models to enterprise data, Snowflake enables organizations to build and deploy AI on top of their most valuable asset using the secure, governed platform they already trust." He added, "Customers can now harness all their enterprise knowledge in Snowflake together with the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models, enabling them to build AI agents that are powerful, responsible, and trustworthy. Together, we're setting a new standard for AI innovation, helping businesses transform with confidence, while maintaining strong security and compliance standards." OpenAI declined to share information on the deal beyond the press release. The OpenAI agreement follows a similar $200 million enterprise deal Snowflake signed with AI research lab Anthropic at the beginning of December. Ramaswamy made comparable comments about the Anthropic partnership, noting it would give customers access to powerful AI models on top of their existing data. Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake, described the OpenAI partnership in an email to TechCrunch. He said, "Our partnership with OpenAI is a multi-year commercial commitment focused on reliability, performance, and real customer usage. At the same time, we remain intentionally model-agnostic. Enterprises need choice, and we do not believe in locking customers into a single provider." Gultekin continued, "OpenAI is an important partner, and it is one of several frontier model providers available on Snowflake today, alongside Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others. Snowflake isn't the only enterprise signing sizable deals with multiple AI companies." This approach maintains Snowflake's position as a platform offering multiple AI options without exclusivity.

Snowflake bypasses Microsoft to strike multiyear deal with OpenAI - SiliconANGLE

Snowflake bypasses Microsoft to strike multiyear deal with OpenAI Snowflake Inc. today said it has struck a $200 million, multiyear partnership with OpenAI Group PBC to bring enterprise-grade generative artificial intelligence models directly into its data platform, deepening a relationship that until now had largely flowed through Microsoft Corp.'s Azure ecosystem. Under the agreement, OpenAI's models will be natively available inside Snowflake Cortex AI managed service and Snowflake Intelligence, giving Snowflake's 12,600 customers the ability to build and deploy AI applications and agents directly on governed enterprise data across all three major public clouds. The deal positions OpenAI as one of the primary model providers on Snowflake's platform, alongside Anthropic PBC, Meta Platforms Inc. and Mistral AI SAS. Snowflake Chief Executive Officer Sridhar Ramaswamy said the partnership clears the way for Snowflake customers to move beyond experimentation to production-ready AI. "Customers can now harness all their enterprise knowledge in Snowflake together with the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models, enabling them to build AI agents that are powerful, responsible and trustworthy," he said in a prepared statement. The companies said joint customers including Canva Pty Ltd. and Whoop Inc. plan to use OpenAI models within Snowflake to deploy context-aware AI applications and agents across their businesses. OpenAI models such as GPT-5.2 will be accessible within Snowflake Intelligence, an enterprise agent that allows employees to query and act on structured and unstructured data using natural language. Executives framed the deal as a shift from Snowflake's earlier, Microsoft-enabled access to OpenAI toward a direct, first-party relationship. "The partnership, or the ability to host OpenAI models, has been mostly in a partnership with Microsoft," Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake's executive vice president of product, said during a media and analyst roundtable ahead of Snowflake's Build London event this week. "This is directly with OpenAI." Kleinerman said the goal is to make advanced models available while preserving the security, governance and compliance controls enterprises expect from Snowflake. "All innovation at Snowflake is centered and rooted on the challenges customers have," he said, pointing to issues such as data silos, infrastructure complexity and regulatory requirements. As part of the collaboration, Snowflake and OpenAI will co-develop new features using OpenAI's application programming interfaces and agent frameworks, with an emphasis on building interoperable AI agents that can reason over governed data and act across enterprise systems. Snowflake said agents will run directly on customer data inside its AI Data Cloud, rather than requiring data to be moved to external services. The companies also highlighted Snowflake's enterprise-readiness features, such as its 99.99% uptime service-level agreement, business continuity capabilities and governance controls provided through the Snowflake Horizon Catalog. Those safeguards are intended to address concerns among regulated industries about reliability and responsible AI use. The partnership also extends to internal use. Snowflake said OpenAI uses Snowflake as a data platform for experiment tracking and analytics, while Snowflake uses ChatGPT Enterprise internally to support employee productivity and decision-making.

Snowflake partners with OpenAI in $200 million AI deal

Snowflake said on Monday it has entered a $200 million partnership with OpenAI to integrate advanced artificial intelligence models directly into its ⁠cloud data platform, as enterprises increasingly turn to AI to extract insights from vast troves of data. Snowflake said on Monday it has entered a $200 million partnership with OpenAI to integrate advanced artificial intelligence models directly into its ⁠cloud data platform, as enterprises increasingly turn to AI to extract insights from vast troves of data. Budget 2026 Critics' choice rather than crowd-pleaser, Aiyar saysSitharaman's Paisa Vasool Budget banks on what money can do for you bestBudget's clear signal to global investors: India means business Cloud data platforms, where companies store much of their most valuable and sensitive information, are emerging as a key battleground for generative AI businesses. By embedding AI models directly into these platforms, vendors aim to let enterprises analyze data, search internal documents and automate tasks more easily, while preserving strict data security and governance controls. Under the deal, Snowflake and the ChatGPT maker will develop AI agents capable of handling complex workflows, allowing users to ask questions in natural language and receive answers drawn from company data without writing code. The partnership reflects a broader shift among enterprises, which are moving from experimenting with basic AI chatbots to deploying integrated agents that can work directly with proprietary data, increasingly prioritizing systems that combine automation with tighter oversight. Snowflake said the partnership expands earlier collaboration between the two companies by making OpenAI's models available within Snowflake across all three major cloud providers, rather than primarily through Microsoft Azure. Several customers, including design platform Canva and ⁠fitness wearable maker ⁠WHOOP, are already using the joint offering to speed up research, analytics and internal decision-making, according to the cloud data platform. The announcement comes amid intensifying competition in the data and AI market. Rival Databricks has continued to scale aggressively, recently raising $4 billion at a $134 billion valuation to fund its "Agentbricks" framework and a growing suite of AI products.

Snowflake Expands Enterprise AI Push With $200 Million OpenAI Partnership - Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW)

Snowflake Inc (NYSE:SNOW) is deepening its push into enterprise artificial intelligence through a new multi-year partnership with OpenAI designed to help global companies turn their proprietary data into real business value. Snowflake on Monday announced a new collaboration with OpenAI that includes a multi-year, $200 million agreement focused on co-innovation and joint go-to-market strategies. The companies said the partnership will support the development and deployment of customized AI solutions and AI agents for enterprise customers, with the goal of delivering measurable returns on investment. OpenAI Models Go Native Inside Snowflake's Platform Under the direct, first-party agreement, OpenAI models will become natively available to Snowflake's 12,600 global customers through Snowflake Cortex AI across all three major cloud platforms. Snowflake said organizations such as Canva and WHOOP will be able to bring OpenAI models directly to their enterprise data for research and insights. Models including GPT-5.2 will also be accessible through Snowflake Intelligence. Analysts See AI Upside, Flag Competitive Risks The collaboration builds on an existing relationship in which OpenAI uses Snowflake as its data platform for analytics and testing, while Snowflake uses ChatGPT Enterprise internally to help employees make faster decisions, streamline workflows, and boost productivity. Snowflake stock has gained 6% in the last 12 months. Bank of America Securities analyst Koji Ikeda reiterated a Buy rating on Snowflake but cut his price forecast to $275 from $310, citing shifting growth expectations. The analyst expects Snowflake to still sustain or reaccelerate product revenue growth in the high-20% range citing expansion of its offerings and benefits from increasing AI adoption. He expects customers to keep raising spending as Snowflake serves as core infrastructure for enterprise data and AI workloads, supporting faster growth than infrastructure software peers and improving free cash flow margins. At the same time, Ikeda flagged competition from hyperscalers and Databricks as the main risk, warning that stronger rivals could pressure pricing and drive higher investment needs. He also noted Snowflake's reliance on hyperscaler infrastructure could become a structural disadvantage, while adding that although the stock trades at a premium, its valuation looks more reasonable when adjusted for growth. SNOW Price Action: Snowflake shares were up 1.30% at $195.21 at the time of publication on Monday, according to Benzinga Pro data. Photo: Grand Warszawski / Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Snowflake Inks $200M Collaboration Alliance To Bring OpenAI Models To Cortex AI Services

OpenAI models will now be one of the primary model capabilities in the Snowflake Data Cloud platform, making it easier to use those models combined with an organization's proprietary data to develop context-aware Ai applications and agents. Data and AI cloud giant Snowflake and AI model developer OpenAI have established a strategic alliance through which they will jointly deliver advanced AI model capabilities to enterprise customers. Under the multi-year collaboration deal, which the companies valued at $200 million, OpenAI models will be natively available to Snowflake's 12,600 global customers within the Snowflake Cortex AI service across all three major cloud platforms. Through the partnership, announced Monday, OpenAI is now one of the primary model capabilities in the Snowflake platform. That, according to the companies, will allow businesses and organizations to leverage OpenAI models in Snowflake to deploy context-aware AI applications and agents that leverage their proprietary data. [Related: Snowflake CEO Confirms Observe Acquisition To Boost 'Enterprisewide Observability'] OpenAI models such as GPT-5.2 will also be available within Snowflake Intelligence, the data cloud company's own natural language-based agentic AI platform that's built into the company's data cloud. The partnership also includes co-innovation and joint go-to-market initiatives through which Snowflake and OpenAI will develop and deploy customized AI solutions that deliver tangible ROI for joint enterprise customers. The alliance, the companies said, will accelerate the adoption of agentic AI by global enterprises through their improved ability to deploy AI applications and agents at scale that deliver consistent, trusted outcomes. "By bringing OpenAI models to enterprise data, Snowflake enables organizations to build and deploy AI on top of their most valuable asset using the secure, governed platform they already trust," said Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, in. a statement. "Customers can now harness all their enterprise knowledge in Snowflake together with the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models, enabling them to build AI agents that are powerful, responsible, and trustworthy. Together, we're setting a new standard for AI innovation, helping businesses transform with confidence, while maintaining strong security and compliance standards," Ramaswamy said. Snowflake struck a similar deal with AI research and development company Anthropic -- also valued at $200 million -- in December. Through that alliance Anthropic's Claude AI models are also available on the Snowflake platform. The Snowflake-OpenAI partnership builds on the two companies' earlier collaboration that includes OpenAI's use of the Snowflake platform for experiment tracking, analytics and testing. Snowflake employees, meanwhile, leverage OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise internally for a range of tasks including decision making, managing workflows and cross-functional collaboration. "Snowflake is a trusted platform that sits at the center of how enterprises manage and activate their most critical data," said Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications at OpenAI, also in the statement. "This partnership brings our advanced models directly into that environment, making it easier to deploy AI agents and apps, so businesses can close the gap between what AI is capable of and the value they can create today." Snowflake and OpenAI said their expanded joint development work will result in new features that leverage the OpenAI Apps SDK, AgentKit and APIs that support shared enterprise workflows. The partnership, according to the companies, will better enable enterprises to build state-of-the-art AI agents that are powered by Cortex AI and can "reason over governed data and take action across tools and apps." The Snowflake-OpenAI collaboration also provides the ability to use Cortex AI Functions to tap into OpenAI models to analyze data of all types, including unstructured text, images and audio, using SQL. As part of the announcement, Snowflake and OpenAI cited graphic design platform company Canva and fitness wearable device maker WHOOP as examples of customers who stand to benefit from the new partnership. "As we scale our visual AI offering on Canva, both OpenAI and Snowflake have played key roles in how we rapidly empower our users with new creative tools," said Helen Crossley, Canva head of data science, in a statement. "As our platform continues to scale, Snowflake has been foundational to how we manage and activate data, and we're excited to explore how leveraging OpenAI models in Snowflake Cortex AI can help us extend that foundation. The ability to bridge advanced AI models with our enterprise data allows us to move quickly and test new ideas, without compromising on security or performance." WHOOP already uses Snowflake Intelligence to develop AI agents for data analysis and decision-making tasks, the Snowflake-OpenAI announcement said, quoting Matt Luizzi, WHOOP's senior director of business analytics. "With OpenAI's models available directly within Snowflake Cortex AI, we can further enhance those agents with advanced reasoning and analysis, all while maintaining strong security and governance," he said.

Snowflake and OpenAI Expand Partnership to Bring AI Into Enterprise Data | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Under the agreement, which was announced in a Monday (Feb. 2) news release, OpenAI's models will be available natively within Snowflake's AI Data Cloud, allowing organizations to build and deploy AI applications and agents using their own enterprise data without moving that data outside Snowflake's environment. Snowflake said the collaboration will enable use cases such as intelligent assistants, automated analytics, and AI-driven decision support tied directly to enterprise datasets. "By bringing OpenAI models to enterprise data, Snowflake enables organizations to build and deploy AI on top of their most valuable asset using the secure, governed platform they already trust," said Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake. "Customers can now harness all their enterprise knowledge in Snowflake together with the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models, enabling them to build AI agents that are powerful, responsible, and trustworthy." For OpenAI, the deal extends its reach into large enterprise accounts that already rely on Snowflake to manage and analyze sensitive data. By integrating directly into the Snowflake ecosystem, OpenAI positions its models as infrastructure rather than tools, embedding them deeper into day-to-day enterprise operations. The announcement comes as competition intensifies among data and cloud providers to define the default stack for enterprise AI. Snowflake has been expanding its AI offerings while facing growing rivalry from cloud hyperscalers and data platform competitors that are also racing to embed large language models into analytics and operational workflow. In related news, PYMNTS reported in January that Snowflake plans to acquire Observe, a provider of observability tools that help enterprises troubleshoot and monitor AI agents and data flows in real time. The acquisition is aimed at enhancing Snowflake's ability to support complex AI deployments by offering faster issue detection and root-cause analysis for AI-driven systems.

Inside Snowflake and OpenAI's $200 million plan for enterprise AI

Joint innovation turns AI from experiments into enterprise infrastructure When enterprise AI finally grows up, it won't be because another model got smarter. It'll be because AI learned where to live and be truly useful. That's the quiet significance behind the new multi-year, $200 million partnership between Snowflake and OpenAI - a deal that's less about flashy demos and more about behind-the-scenes plumbing. The kind CIOs actually trust. According to Snowflake, OpenAI's frontier models now become natively available inside Snowflake Cortex AI for all their customers - of which the likes of Canva and WHOOP are big names thus far. OpenAI and Snowflake also announced a joint product development and go-to-market strategy, especially for enterprise clients. For years, enterprises have experimented with AI without any clear takeaways - with no real impact in 95% cases, according to an MIT study. The missing piece hasn't been intelligence, but context. Because AI with enterprise data isn't just clever but actually useful like never before. AI that can reason over governed enterprise data, securely, at scale - that's truly transformative. That's where this Snowflake and OpenAI partnership aims to achieve. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy frames it as bringing "the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models" directly to "the secure, governed platform [customers] already trust." Meanwhile, OpenAI's Fidji Simo puts it as closing "the gap between what AI is capable of and the value businesses can create today." Under the hood, this isn't a cloud-mediated arrangement or a loosely coupled API handshake. As Snowflake VP of AI Baris Gultekin explains, "Snowflake customers have been able to use OpenAI models before, but this partnership is different in that it's a direct, first-party partnership, rather than mediated through a cloud provider." According to Gultekin, that distinction is key, because it enables "deep, first-party integration of OpenAI's frontier models directly into Snowflake's governed AI platform, paired with a multi-year commercial commitment that ensures reliability, performance, and roadmap and GTM alignment." This means fewer integration surprises, and a clearer path from pilot to production. The co-innovation angle isn't marketing fluff either. OpenAI itself runs key parts of its own stack on Snowflake, while Snowflake embeds OpenAI models into Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence. "This creates a tight feedback loop where each company is actively helping improve the other's technology based on real-world enterprise usage," Gultekin notes. That kind of mutual dependency is rare and, of course, powerful. The practical upshot is agentic AI that actually does things. This means agents that can reason over structured and unstructured data, take action across enterprise tools, and operate inside strict governance boundaries. Snowflake Intelligence, powered by models like GPT-5.2, aims to give every employee a natural-language interface to their company's collective knowledge - usable for anyone without an SQL degree as well. Of course, betting big on OpenAI raises an obvious question, which I asked Gultekin. Does Snowflake risk becoming a one-model company? Gultekin is emphatic that it doesn't. "Snowflake's AI strategy is model-agnostic by design," he says. "OpenAI is an important partner, and it is one of several frontier model providers available on Snowflake today, alongside Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others." Customers keep the choice - and the controls. Zooming out, this partnership signals where enterprise AI is headed next. Less experimentation at the edges, more intelligence embedded at the core. AI not as a novelty, but as infrastructure.