What Snowflake’s deal with OpenAI tells us about the AI ​​race for business

Cloud data company Snowflake entered into a $200 million AI deal with OpenAI on Monday, the latest sign that the business AI race continues to heat up.

Under the agreement, Snowflake’s 12,600 customers will have access to OpenAI models across all three major cloud providers. Snowflake employees have access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise as well. The two companies are working together to develop new AI agents and other AI products.

“By bringing OpenAI models to business data, Snowflake empowers organizations to build and deploy AI on top of their most valuable assets using a secure, managed platform they already trust,” Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said in a press release. “Customers can now leverage all of their business intelligence on Snowflake and the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models, enabling them to build powerful, responsible, and trustworthy AI agents. Together, we’re setting a new standard for AI innovation, helping businesses evolve with confidence, while maintaining strong security and compliance standards.”

OpenAI declined to share information about the deal beyond a press release.

If this deal sounds familiar, it is. Snowflake announced a $200 million venture deal with AI research lab Anthropic in early December. At the time, Ramaswamy was quoted as making similar comments about how the partnership with Anthropic will 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 customer use. At the same time, we remain intentionally agnostic. Businesses need choice, and we don’t believe in locking customers into a single provider,” Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake told TechCrunch via email. “OpenAI is a key partner, and one of the few model providers available on Snowflake today, alongside Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others.

Snowflake isn’t the only business signing big deals with multiple AI companies.

In January, workflow automation platform ServiceNow announced multi-year agreements with both OpenAI and Anthropic for the same reasons as Snowflake. ServiceNow president, COO and CPO Amit Zavery told TechCrunch at the time that working with both AI labs was intentional because they wanted to give their customers and employees the ability to choose which model they want based on the work they do.

It’s hard to pinpoint which AI companies are seeing the most business adoption success so far.

Menlo Ventures’ survey as of late 2025 shows its portfolio company Anthropic holds the market lead; last week’s Andreessen Horowitz report found that its portfolio company OpenAI is leading the pack.

These conflicting surveys make it difficult to accurately track business AI adoption trends. However, this latest series of agreements provides a glimpse of what enterprise AI adoption will look like. Conclusion: enterprises will continue to form partnerships with many AI companies because each offers large language models with different strengths and weaknesses.

Businesses will likely work with many AI players because different AI companies and their big language models come with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Enterprise AI could easily be a market with few winners with an overlapping customer base, similar to how many ride-hail users switch between Lyft and Uber based on what makes the most sense at the time. For example: employees of these businesses already use the model they prefer regardless of their company contracts.

Or maybe there will be a clear winner after all. But for now, it’s likely that we’ll see businesses inking ink with more players as they continue to hunt for where AI can deliver tangible value.