Cloud data company Snowflake strikes deal $200 million multi-year AI deal with OpenAI on Monday, the latest signal that competition in enterprise AI continues to heat up.
Under the deal, Snowflake’s 12,600 customers will have access to OpenAI models from the three major cloud providers. Snowflake employees also have access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise. The two companies are also partnering to create new AI agents and other AI products.
“By integrating OpenAI models with enterprise data, Snowflake enables organizations to build and deploy AI on their most valuable asset using the secure, governed platform they already trust,” Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, said in a press release. “Customers can now leverage all of their enterprise knowledge in Snowflake along with the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models, enabling them to create powerful, accountable, and trustworthy AI agents. Together, we are setting a new standard for AI innovation, helping businesses transform with confidence, while maintaining strict security and compliance standards.”
OpenAI declined to share information about the deal beyond the press release.
If this deal sounds familiar, it should. Snowflake announced a $200 million corporate deal with AI research lab Anthropic at the beginning of December. At the time, Ramaswamy reportedly made very similar comments about how partnering with Anthropic would give its customers access to powerful AI models on top of their existing data.
“Our partnership with OpenAI is a multi-year commercial commitment focused on reliability, performance and real-world customer usage. At the same time, we remain intentionally model agnostic. Businesses need choice and we don’t believe in locking customers into a single vendor,” Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake, told TechCrunch via email. “OpenAI is an important partner, and one of several pioneering model providers available on Snowflake today, alongside Anthropic, Google, Meta and others.
Snowflake is also not the only company to sign major deals with several AI companies.
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In January, the ServiceNow workflow automation platform announced multi-year agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic for very similar reasons to Snowflake. ServiceNow President, COO and CPO Amit Zavery told TechCrunch at the time that working with the two AI labs was deliberate because they wanted to give their customers and employees the flexibility to choose the model they wanted based on the task at hand.
It’s difficult to determine which AI companies are seeing the most success in enterprise adoption so far.
A Menlo Ventures Survey from the end of 2025, this shows that its portfolio company Anthropic holds a considerable lead in the market; A Andreessen Horowitz Report Last week, we naturally saw that its portfolio company, OpenAI, was leading the pack.
These conflicting surveys make it difficult to accurately track AI usage trends in business. However, this latest round of deals provides a short-term view of what enterprise AI adoption will look like. The bottom line: Companies will continue to partner with multiple AI companies because each offers large language models with varying strengths and weaknesses.
Companies will likely partner with multiple AI players, as different AI companies and their broad language models have their own strengths and weaknesses.
Enterprise AI could easily become a market containing multiple winners with an overlapping customer base, similar to the number of ride-hailing users who swap between Lyft and Uber based on what makes the most sense at the time. Concrete example: employees of these companies already use their preferred model, regardless of their company contract.
Or maybe there will ultimately be a clear winner. But for now, it’s likely we’ll see companies strike deals with multiple players as they continue to look for where AI can deliver tangible value.
