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

Cloud information institution Snowflake has entered into a $200 cardinal multi-year AI deal with OpenAI connected Monday, the latest awesome that endeavor AI contention continues to vigor up.

Under the deal, Snowflake’s 12,600 customers volition person entree to OpenAI models crossed each 3 large unreality providers. Snowflake employees entree to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise arsenic well. The 2 companies are besides partnering to physique caller AI agents and different AI products.

“By bringing OpenAI models to endeavor data, Snowflake enables organizations to physique and deploy AI connected apical of their astir invaluable plus utilizing the secure, governed level they already trust,” Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said successful a property release. “Customers tin present harness each their endeavor cognition successful Snowflake unneurotic with the world-class quality of OpenAI models, enabling them to physique AI agents that are powerful, responsible, and trustworthy. Together, we’re mounting a caller modular for AI innovation, helping businesses alteration with confidence, portion maintaining beardown information and compliance standards.”

OpenAI declined to stock accusation connected the woody beyond the property release.

If this woody feels familiar, it should. Snowflake announced a $200 cardinal endeavor woody with AI probe laboratory Anthropic astatine the opening of December. At the time, Ramaswamy was quoted making precise akin comments astir however the concern with Anthropic would springiness its customers entree to almighty AI models connected apical of their existing data.

“Our concern with OpenAI is simply a multi-year commercialized committedness focused connected reliability, performance, and existent lawsuit usage. At the aforesaid time, we stay intentionally model-agnostic. Enterprises request choice, and we bash not judge successful locking customers into a azygous provider,” Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI astatine Snowflake told TechCrunch implicit email. “OpenAI is an important partner, and it is 1 of respective frontier exemplary providers disposable connected Snowflake today, alongside Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others. 

Snowflake isn’t the lone endeavor signing sizable deals with aggregate AI companies either.

In January, workflow automation level ServiceNow announced multi-year deals with some OpenAI and Anthropic for precise akin reasons arsenic Snowflake. ServiceNow president, COO and CPO Amit Zavery told TechCrunch astatine the clip that moving with some AI labs was deliberate due to the fact that they wanted to springiness their customers and employees the quality to take which exemplary they wanted based connected the task astatine hand.

It’s hard to pinpoint which AI companies are seeing the astir endeavor adoption occurrence frankincense far.

A Menlo Ventures survey from precocious 2025 shows its portfolio institution Anthropic holds a commanding marketplace lead; an Andreessen Horowitz report from past week people recovered its portfolio institution OpenAI is starring the pack.

These conflicting surveys marque it hard to accurately way endeavor AI usage trends. However, this latest drawstring of deals does supply a short-term presumption of what endeavor AI adoption volition look like. The upshot: enterprises volition proceed to onslaught partnerships with aggregate AI companies due to the fact that each 1 offers ample connection models with varying strengths and weaknesses.

Enterprises are apt going to spouse with aggregate AI players due to the fact that antithetic AI companies and their ample connection models travel with their ain strengths and weaknesses.

Enterprise AI could easy go a marketplace that contains respective winners with an overlapping lawsuit base, akin to however galore ride-hail users swap betwixt Lyft and Uber based connected what makes the astir consciousness for that moment. Case successful point: employees of these enterprises already usage their preferred exemplary careless of their institution contracts.

Or possibly determination volition beryllium a wide victor aft all. But for now, it’s apt we are going to spot enterprises ink deals with aggregate players arsenic they proceed to hunt for wherever AI tin present tangible value.