Snowflake signs $200 million deal with OpenAI

On Monday, cloud data company Snowflake entered into a $200 million multi-year deal with OpenAI. Under the agreement, Snowflake’s 12,600 customers will have access to OpenAI models across all three major cloud providers. Additionally, Snowflake employees have access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy stated that bringing OpenAI models to enterprise data enables organizations to build and deploy AI on top of their most valuable asset using a secure, governed platform. Ramaswamy noted that customers can now harness their enterprise knowledge in Snowflake alongside OpenAI’s models to build powerful, responsible, and trustworthy AI agents.

The agreement follows a pattern of enterprise software companies securing access to multiple AI systems:

• Anthropic: At the beginning of December, Snowflake announced a $200 million enterprise deal with Anthropic to provide customers with access to its models.
• ServiceNow: In January, the workflow automation platform ServiceNow announced multi-year deals with both OpenAI and Anthropic. Amit Zavery, the president, COO, and CPO of ServiceNow, noted that working with both providers was a deliberate choice to give customers and employees the ability to choose models based on the task at hand.

These overlapping agreements reflect a deliberate strategy. Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake, stated that the company remains intentionally model-agnostic—a strategy of not relying on a single AI provider. “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 said. He added that OpenAI is one of several frontier model providers—advanced large language models—available on Snowflake today, alongside Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others.

This multi-provider approach is becoming the standard as organizations navigate conflicting market signals. For example, a Menlo Ventures survey from late 2025 showed Anthropic holding a market lead, while an Andreessen Horowitz report from last week found OpenAI leading the pack. Because different AI companies and their models come with their own strengths and weaknesses, enterprises are likely going to partner with multiple AI players to avoid vendor lock-in and leverage specific capabilities.

Why it matters

The deal highlights a shift in enterprise AI strategy where companies are increasingly avoiding vendor lock-in by partnering with multiple model providers to leverage specific strengths.