Snowflake and OpenAI today unveiled a new multi-year strategic partnership valued at $200 million, aimed at embedding advanced AI capabilities directly into enterprise data environments and accelerating how businesses deploy intelligent applications and AI agents at scale. The announcement marks a major milestone in the evolution of enterprise artificial intelligence, bringing frontier AI closer to the data that powers the world’s largest organisations.
Under the partnership, OpenAI’s industry-leading models — including the latest GPT-5.2 architecture — will be natively available inside the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. This integration enables Snowflake’s more than 12,600 global customers to build custom AI applications and intelligent agents that reason over proprietary data without requiring data to leave Snowflake’s secure, governed environment.
The collaboration extends and deepens the companies’ existing work together. Through Snowflake Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence, organisations can now access OpenAI models directly from within their Snowflake deployments across major cloud platforms — including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud — giving enterprises flexibility and avoiding dependence on any single cloud service.
“By bringing OpenAI models to enterprise data, Snowflake enables organisations 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, in the companies’ 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.”
“Snowflake is a trusted platform that sits at the centre of how enterprises manage and activate their most critical data,” added Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications at OpenAI. “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.”
Enterprise AI Agents and New Use Cases
The core of the collaboration is enterprises’ ability to create agentic AI solutions—software agents powered by large language models that understand and act on business data, automate workflows, and provide insights across functions such as analytics, operations, customer support, and research. These intelligent agents leverage the company’s own data to answer natural-language questions, drive automated decision-making, and execute multi-step tasks — all while maintaining data control through Snowflake’s governance capabilities.
Because the integration runs directly in Snowflake’s environment, organisations can benefit from advanced AI reasoning without moving sensitive data to external systems—a significant advantage for regulated industries where data security and compliance are paramount. The combined platform also supports multimodal intelligence, allowing AI systems to analyse text, image, audio, and structured datasets with equal ease.
Early Adoption and Real-World Demand
Several enterprise customers are already deploying AI capabilities enabled by the partnership. Companies such as design platform Canva and fitness wearable maker WHOOP are using OpenAI models within the Snowflake AI Data Cloud to accelerate insights, research, and internal decision-making. These early adopters underscore the demand for secure, scalable AI that works directly with enterprise-scale data.
Strategic and Competitive Context
The $200 million investment reflects joint commitments across product development and go-to-market strategies, with engineering teams from both Snowflake and OpenAI collaborating to build new tools — including support for OpenAI Apps SDK, AgentKit, and shared APIs — that streamline enterprise AI workflows.
The partnership also illustrates the competitive urgency in the enterprise AI market as organisations seek platforms that combine robust data management with cutting-edge AI. By embedding AI capabilities closer to where data resides, Snowflake and OpenAI aim to accelerate the transition from AI experiments to production-grade AI applications.
What Comes Next
Snowflake and OpenAI plan to roll out additional features and integrations over the coming months. Snowflake will continue to leverage AI internally, using ChatGPT Enterprise to streamline workflows and accelerate productivity for its own teams while offering increasingly sophisticated AI capabilities to customers.
As enterprise AI continues to mature, the partnership between Snowflake and OpenAI signals a new phase in which data platforms and AI models are tightly aligned, promising faster innovation cycles, stronger security, and more practical AI value creation for businesses worldwide.
Senior AI Writer
Bio: Okikiola is a writer and AI enthusiast with a background in Office Technology and Management from the Federal Polytechnic Offa. She went further to study an MSc in International Business at De Montfort University (DMU). With extensive work experience across administrative and business roles, she now focuses on exploring how artificial intelligence can transform work, innovation, and everyday life.