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

Cloud data company Snowflake has entered into an agreement Multi-year $200 million AI deal with OpenAI on Monday, the latest sign that competition in business AI continues to increase.

Under the deal, Snowflake’s 12,600 customers will have access to OpenAI models from all three major cloud providers. Snowflake employees also have access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise. The two companies are also working together 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 asset, using the secure, managed platform they already trust,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, in a press release. “Customers can now leverage all their business knowledge in Snowflake, along with the intelligence of world-class OpenAI models, allowing them to build AI agents that are powerful, responsible, and reliable. Together, we are setting a new standard for AI innovation, enabling businesses to 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 feels familiar, it should. Snowflake announced a $200 million enterprise deal with AI research lab Anthropic in early December. At the time, Ramaswamy was quoted making very similar comments about how the partnership 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 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 provider,” Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake, told TechCrunch via email. “OpenAI is a key partner, and it is one of many frontier model providers currently available on Snowflake, alongside Anthropic, Google, Meta and others.

Snowflake isn’t the only company to have signed significant deals with multiple AI companies.

In January, workflow automation platform ServiceNow announced multi-year deals with both OpenAI and Anthropic for very similar reasons to Snowflake. ServiceNow President, COO and CPO Amit Zavery told TechCrunch at the time that working with both AI labs was purposeful, as they wanted to give their customers and employees the ability to choose which model they wanted based on the task at hand.

It’s difficult to pinpoint which AI companies have had the most success in business adoption to date.

A Menlo Ventures Survey as of the end of 2025, its portfolio company Anthropic shows impressive market leadership; An Andreessen Horowitz Report of course last week discovered that his portfolio company OpenAI is leading the way.

These conflicting studies make it difficult to accurately track trends in AI adoption in enterprises. However, this latest round of deals does provide a short-term view of what enterprise AI adoption will look like. The result: Enterprises will continue to form partnerships with multiple AI companies, as each company offers large language models with different strengths and weaknesses.

Companies are likely to collaborate with multiple AI players, as different AI companies and their major language models have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Enterprise AI could easily become a market that contains several winners with an overlapping customer base, similar to the number of ride-hail users switching between Lyft and Uber based on what makes the most sense at the time. For example, employees of these companies already use their preferred model, regardless of their corporate contracts.

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