Cooperation: Snowflake integrates OpenAI LLMs

Data cloud provider Snowflake and OpenAI have agreed on a collaboration worth 200 million US dollars. The core of this cooperation is the native deployment of leading OpenAI models directly within the Snowflake platform. Snowflake's corporate customers will gain access to powerful models like GPT-5.2 without their sensitive data having to leave the secure environment.

The goal of this alliance is the development and dissemination of Agentic AI, meaning AI agents capable of autonomously handling complex tasks and making informed decisions based on company-specific data. By integrating the models into Snowflake Cortex AI, corporations can use these technologies across all three major clouds.

Canva and WHOOP are already using the system

One advantage of this approach is bridging the gap between the theoretical possibilities of AI and actual business value. Companies can now securely combine their proprietary data assets with OpenAI's intelligence to develop customized applications. Prominent customers such as the design platform Canva or the fitness tracker manufacturer WHOOP are already using these capabilities to accelerate their internal processes and deploy new features without compromising on security or governance.

Trend: using different AI providers with different strengths

The deal between Snowflake and OpenAI represents a trend in the IT strategy of modern large enterprises, which can be described as model agnosticism. Although Snowflake is intensifying its collaboration with OpenAI, the company is not binding itself exclusively to a single provider, but rather pursuing the goal of guaranteeing its customers freedom of choice. Snowflake had only recently concluded a similarly endowed agreement worth 200 million US dollars with Anthropic.
This strategy is based on the realization that in the field of generative AI, there is no single provider that covers all requirements. Different models have different strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, companies want to choose flexibly between providers like OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic.

Other industry giants like ServiceNow are also pursuing such strategies and signing contracts with multiple AI providers to offer their users maximum flexibility. This development suggests that competition for dominance in the Enterprise AI sector will increasingly be decided by the depth of integration and the practical applicability of models to specific business data, rather than just the sheer performance of the algorithms.

The partnership between Snowflake and OpenAI is also not a one-way street, as both sides also act as customers of each other: While Snowflake internally uses ChatGPT Enterprise to increase employee productivity, OpenAI uses Snowflake's infrastructure for analysis and testing purposes.

Ultimately, this close integration signals that the future of enterprise IT lies in the seamless fusion of secure data storage and flexible, cross-model AI.