What Snowflake’s deal with OpenAI tells us about the enterprise AI race

Cloud data company Snowflake closed a multi-year, $200 million AI deal with OpenAI on Monday, the latest sign that the enterprise AI competition continues to heat up.

Under the deal, Snowflake’s 12,600 customers will be able to access OpenAI models across all three major cloud providers. Snowflake employees can access OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise as well. The two companies are also collaborating to build new AI agents and other AI products.

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

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

If this deal sounds familiar, it should be. Snowflake announced a $200 million enterprise deal with artificial intelligence research lab Anthropic at the beginning of December. At the time, Ramaswamy was quoted as making very similar comments about how the partnership with Anthropic would give its clients access to powerful AI models on top of their existing data.

“Our partnership with OpenAI is a multi-year business commitment focused on reliability, performance, and real customer usage. At the same time, we remain intentionally agnostic to models. Businesses need choice, and we don’t believe in locking customers into one provider,” Paris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake, told TechCrunch via email. “OpenAI is an important partner, and is one of many leading model providers available on Snowflake today, alongside Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others.

Snowflake isn’t the only organization signing big deals with several AI companies either.

In January, workflow automation platform ServiceNow announced multi-year deals with both OpenAI and Anthropic for very similar reasons to Snowflake. Amit Zaveri, president, COO and COO of ServiceNow, told TechCrunch at the time that working with both AI testers was intentional because they wanted to give their customers and employees the ability to choose the model they wanted based on the task at hand.

It’s difficult to pinpoint which AI companies are seeing the most success in enterprise adoption so far.

A Menlo Ventures survey conducted in late 2025 shows that its portfolio company Anthropic has market leadership; Andreessen Horowitz’s report released last week naturally found its portfolio company OpenAI leading the pack.

These conflicting surveys make it difficult to accurately track enterprise AI usage trends. However, this latest series of deals provides a short-term view of what enterprise AI adoption will look like. The result: Companies will continue to partner with multiple AI companies because each one offers great language models with varying strengths and weaknesses.

Companies are likely to partner with multiple AI players because different AI companies and their large language models have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Enterprise AI could easily become a multi-winner market with an overlapping customer base, similar to how many ride-hailing users switch between Lyft and Uber based on what makes the most sense at that moment. Case in point: Employees of these organizations already use their preferred model regardless of their contracts with the company.

Or maybe there will be a clear winner after all. But for now, we’ll likely see companies strike deals with multiple players as they continue to look for where AI can deliver tangible value.