Cloud data company Snowflake signed a $200 million, multi-year AI contract with OpenAI on Monday, the latest sign that the enterprise AI race continues to heat up.
The deal will give Snowflake’s 12,600 customers access to OpenAI models across all three major cloud providers. Snowflake employees also have access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise. The two companies are also collaborating to build new AI agents and other AI products.
“By bringing the OpenAI model to enterprise data, organizations can 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. “Now customers can leverage all of Snowflake’s enterprise knowledge, along with the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models, to build powerful, accountable, and trustworthy AI agents. Together, we are setting a new standard for AI innovation and enabling enterprises to transform with confidence while maintaining strong security and compliance standards.”
OpenAI declined to share information about the transaction following the press release.
If this deal sounds familiar, it probably is. Snowflake announced a $200 million enterprise deal with AI research lab Anthropic in early December. At the time, Ramaswamy was quoted as saying very similar comments about how his partnership with Anthropic would give customers access to powerful AI models on top of 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 are intentionally model-agnostic. Enterprises need choice, and we do not believe in locking customers into a single provider,” Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake, told TechCrunch in an email. “OpenAI is an important partner and one of several pioneering model providers currently available in Snowflake, along with Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others.
Snowflake is not the only company to have signed large contracts with several AI companies.
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Last January, workflow automation platform ServiceNow announced a multi-year deal with OpenAI and Anthropic for very similar reasons to Snowflake. Amit Zavery, President, COO and CPO of ServiceNow, told TechCrunch at the time that the collaboration with the two AI labs was intentional because the company wanted to give customers and employees the ability to choose the model they want based on the task at hand.
To date, it is difficult to pinpoint which AI companies have had the greatest success in enterprise adoption.
At the end of 2025, Menlo Ventures research showed that its portfolio company Anthropic was the market leader. Last week’s Andreessen Horowitz report naturally found its portfolio company, OpenAI, to be leading the pack.
These conflicting surveys make it difficult to accurately track trends in enterprise AI usage. But this latest series of deals offers a near-term view of what enterprise AI adoption will look like. As a result, businesses will continue to partner with multiple AI companies. This is because each AI company provides large language models with different strengths and weaknesses.
Companies will likely partner with multiple AI players because different AI companies and their large language models have unique strengths and weaknesses.
Enterprise AI could be a market with multiple winners with overlapping customer bases, similar to how many ridesharing users switch between Lyft and Uber based on what’s best for them at that moment. Case in point: Employees at these companies are already using their preferred model, regardless of their company contracts.
Or maybe there will be a clear winner in the end. But for now, we’ll see companies striking deals with multiple players as they continue to explore areas where AI can provide real value.
