Cloud data company Snowflake entered into a $200 million multi-year AI deal with OpenAI on Monday, signaling that enterprise AI competition is intensifying. With this agreement, Snowflake’s 12,600 customers can utilize OpenAI models across all three major cloud providers. Additionally, Snowflake employees benefit from ChatGPT Enterprise access, and the partnership aims to build new AI agents and other products.

Partnering for AI Innovation

By leveraging OpenAI models, Snowflake enables organizations to build and deploy AI solutions on their trusted and secure data platform. According to CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, customers can now combine their enterprise knowledge stored in Snowflake with OpenAI’s intelligence, creating powerful, responsible, and trustworthy AI agents. This partnership sets a new standard for AI innovation, empowering businesses to transform operations while maintaining strict security and compliance standards.

Although OpenAI declined to offer more details about the agreement, this deal closely follows Snowflake’s similar $200 million partnership with Anthropic announced earlier in December. Both partnerships highlight Snowflake’s commitment to being model-agnostic, giving customers a choice among top AI providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. As Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake, stated, the goal is to offer reliability, performance, and flexibility, allowing customers to avoid vendor lock-in.

Trends in Enterprise AI Partnerships

Snowflake is not alone in this multi-provider approach. In January, ServiceNow also struck multi-year partnerships with both OpenAI and Anthropic. According to ServiceNow’s president Amit Zavery, working with multiple AI labs ensures customers and employees have the flexibility to pick the model best suited for their specific task.

Determining which AI company is leading in enterprise adoption remains challenging. A late 2025 Menlo Ventures survey indicated Anthropic holds a commanding market share, while a more recent Andreessen Horowitz report claims OpenAI is ahead. These conflicting surveys suggest that monitoring actual enterprise AI adoption remains complex. Nevertheless, recent deals suggest that enterprises prefer to partner with multiple AI companies, since each large language model brings distinct advantages and limitations.

The future of enterprise AI may mirror markets like ride-hailing, where users switch between services based on real-time needs. Many employees already use their personal preference of AI model, regardless of company contracts. While one AI provider might eventually dominate, for now, most enterprises are expected to continue signing agreements with several vendors as they search for tangible business value from AI innovations.

Tags: Snowflake, OpenAI, inteligjenca artificiale, partneritet biznesi, cloud computing, tregu i AI