What Snowflake’s deal with OpenAI tells us about the enterprise AI race

Cloud information firm Snowflake entered right into a $200 million multi-year AI take care of OpenAI on Monday, the most recent sign that enterprise AI competitors continues to warmth up.

Below the deal, Snowflake’s 12,600 prospects can have entry to OpenAI fashions throughout all three main cloud suppliers. Snowflake workers have entry to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise as effectively. The 2 corporations are additionally partnering to construct new AI brokers and different AI merchandise.

“By bringing OpenAI fashions to enterprise information, Snowflake allows organizations to construct and deploy AI on prime of their most respected asset utilizing the safe, ruled platform they already belief,” Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy stated in a press launch. “Prospects can now harness all their enterprise information in Snowflake along with the world-class intelligence of OpenAI fashions, enabling them to construct AI brokers which are highly effective, accountable, and reliable. Collectively, we’re setting a brand new customary for AI innovation, serving to companies rework with confidence, whereas sustaining robust safety and compliance requirements.”

OpenAI declined to share info on the deal past the press launch.

If this deal feels acquainted, it ought to. Snowflake introduced a $200 million enterprise take care of AI analysis lab Anthropic firstly of December. On the time, Ramaswamy was quoted making very comparable feedback about how the partnership with Anthropic would give its prospects entry to highly effective AI fashions on prime of their current information.

“Our partnership with OpenAI is a multi-year business dedication centered on reliability, efficiency, and actual buyer utilization. On the identical time, we stay deliberately model-agnostic. Enterprises want selection, and we don’t consider in locking prospects right into a single supplier,” Baris Gultekin, vp of AI at Snowflake, informed Trendster over e mail. “OpenAI is a vital associate, and it’s certainly one of a number of frontier mannequin suppliers obtainable on Snowflake at the moment, alongside Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others. 

Snowflake isn’t the one enterprise signing sizable offers with a number of AI corporations.

In January, workflow automation platform ServiceNow introduced multi-year offers with each OpenAI and Anthropic for very comparable causes as Snowflake. ServiceNow president, COO, and CPO Amit Zavery informed Trendster on the time that working with each AI labs was deliberate as a result of they needed to provide their prospects and workers the flexibility to decide on which mannequin they needed based mostly on the duty at hand.

It’s arduous to pinpoint which AI corporations are seeing probably the most enterprise adoption success up to now.

A Menlo Ventures survey from late 2025 exhibits its portfolio firm Anthropic holds a commanding market lead; an Andreessen Horowitz report from final week naturally discovered its portfolio firm OpenAI is main the pack.

These conflicting surveys make it tough to precisely observe enterprise AI utilization tendencies. Nonetheless, this newest string of offers does present a short-term view of what enterprise AI adoption will appear to be. The upshot: Enterprises will proceed to strike partnerships with a number of AI corporations as a result of every one presents giant language fashions with various strengths and weaknesses.

Enterprises are probably going to associate with a number of AI gamers as a result of completely different AI corporations and their giant language fashions include their very own strengths and weaknesses.

Enterprise AI may simply turn out to be a market that accommodates a number of winners with an overlapping buyer base, just like what number of ride-hail customers swap between Lyft and Uber based mostly on what makes probably the most sense for that second. Working example: Staff of those enterprises already use their most well-liked mannequin no matter their firm contracts.

Or perhaps there will probably be a transparent winner in any case. However for now, it’s probably we’re going to see enterprises ink offers with a number of gamers as they proceed to hunt for the place AI can ship tangible worth.