Cloud data company Snowflake contracted to a $200 million multi-year AI deal with OpenAI on Monday, the latest sign that the business AI competition continues to heat up.
Under the deal, Snowflake’s 12,600 customers will have 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 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, controlled platform they already trust,” said Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy in a press release. “Customers can now leverage all of their business insights in Snowflake along with the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models, enabling them to build AI agents that are powerful, accountable and trustworthy. Together, we’re setting a new standard for AI innovation, helping businesses 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. Snowflake announced a $200 million venture deal with AI research lab Anthropic in early December. At the time, Ramaswamy was reported to have made 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 options and we don’t believe in locking customers into a single provider,” Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake, told TechCrunch. “OpenAI is an important partner and is one of the many model providers available on Snowflake today, along with Anthropic, Google, Meta and others.
Snowflake isn’t the only company to sign major deals with multiple AI companies.
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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 partnering with both AI labs made sense because they wanted to give their customers and employees the ability to choose which model they want based on the task.
It’s hard to pinpoint which AI companies have had the most success in business adoption so far.
A Menlo Ventures Research by the end of 2025 shows that Anthropic’s holding company is a market leader. a Andreessen Horowitz Report as of last week naturally found that the OpenAI portfolio company is leading the pack.
This conflicting research makes it difficult to accurately track AI usage trends in businesses. However, this latest batch of deals provides a short-term view of what business AI adoption will look like. The result: Businesses will continue to partner with multiple AI companies because each offers large language models with different strengths and weaknesses.
Businesses are likely to work with multiple AI players because different AI companies and their big language models have their own strengths and weaknesses.
Enterprise AI could easily become a market containing multiple winners with overlapping customer bases, similar to how many users switch between Lyft and Uber based on what makes the most sense at the time. Example: Employees of these businesses already use their preferred model regardless of their corporate contracts.
Or maybe there will be a clear winner after all. However, for now, we’re likely to see businesses strike deals with multiple players as they continue to look for where AI can deliver tangible value.
