SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 2, 2026, 09:23 (PST)
- Snowflake struck a multi-year, $200 million partnership with OpenAI to bring OpenAI models into its data cloud tools
- The companies are pitching “AI agents” that can work on enterprise data with security and governance controls
- Snowflake said early users include Canva and WHOOP
Snowflake said on Monday it has struck a $200 million partnership with OpenAI to bring the ChatGPT maker’s models into Snowflake’s data cloud products, including Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence. (MarketScreener)
The deal lands as cloud data platforms — where companies store a lot of their most sensitive information — become a battleground for generative AI. Snowflake said customers are moving from basic chatbots to AI agents, software that can take steps across systems, and they want that automation tied to governed data, meaning access is controlled and auditable. Rival Databricks has been building its own agent tools and recently raised $4 billion at a $134 billion valuation, Reuters reported. (Reuters)
The partnership also pulls OpenAI deeper into Snowflake’s stack without leaning mainly on Microsoft’s Azure as the on-ramp. “This is directly with OpenAI,” Snowflake executive vice president of product Christian Kleinerman said at a media and analyst roundtable, according to SiliconANGLE. (SiliconANGLE)
Snowflake is committing up to $200 million over the agreement to buy access to OpenAI’s frontier models and ChatGPT Enterprise, Snowflake AI executive Baris Gultekin said. He called it “not a speculative or symbolic partnership.” (The Register)
OpenAI, for its part, cast Snowflake as a route into the systems enterprises already use to manage data at scale. “Snowflake is a trusted platform that sits at the center of how enterprises manage and activate their most critical data,” OpenAI applications chief Fidji Simo said. (OpenAI)
Snowflake’s Cortex AI Functions expose model calls as SQL functions, letting teams run tasks like summarizing, classifying and extracting information from unstructured data such as text and images without leaving Snowflake. SQL, or structured query language, is the standard language used to query databases. (Snowflake Documentation)
Snowflake also said the tie-up will support multimodal work — not just rows and columns, but text, images and audio — while keeping data in place with its existing controls. “As we scale our visual AI offering on Canva, both OpenAI and Snowflake have played key roles,” Canva head of data science Helen Crossley said. (Business Wire)
Fitness wearable maker WHOOP already uses Snowflake Intelligence to build agents for data analysis and decision-making tasks, the companies said. “With OpenAI’s models available directly within Snowflake Cortex AI, we can further enhance those agents,” WHOOP business analytics director Matt Luizzi said. (CRN)
Snowflake said it will work with OpenAI on new features that use OpenAI’s tools for building agents, alongside joint work to help customers deploy applications in production rather than pilots. (IT Pro)
But the agent pitch comes with a familiar downside: systems that can write and act can also be wrong, and errors get harder to shrug off when they touch live business workflows. How much autonomy companies will tolerate — especially in regulated sectors — will decide how fast these tools spread.
OpenAI is already using Snowflake for experiment tracking, analytics and testing, while Snowflake is using ChatGPT Enterprise internally, Constellation Research reported, citing company statements. (Constellationr)
