What Snowflake does with OpenAI tells us about the AI ​​competition for businesses

Cloud data company Snowflake has entered a $200 million for many years of AI and OpenAI on Monday, the latest sign that the AI ​​competition for companies continues to heat up.

Under the agreement, Snowflake’s 12,600 customers will be able to access OpenAI models across all three cloud providers. Snowflake employees also get OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise. The two companies are also collaborating to develop new AI assistants and other AI products.

“By bringing OpenAI models to enterprise data, Snowflake helps organizations build and deploy AI on top of their valuable assets using the secure platform they already rely on,” Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said in a press release. “Customers can now use all of their business intelligence in Snowflake together with the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models, enabling them to create AI assistants that are powerful, reliable and trustworthy. Together, we are setting a new standard for AI technology, helping businesses transform with confidence, while maintaining strong security and standards compliance.”

OpenAI has declined to share details about the deal beyond a press release.

If this deal sounds familiar, it should. Snowflake declared a $200 million investment meets AI research lab Anthropic in early December. At the time, Ramaswamy was quoted as saying much the same about how the partnership with Anthropic would give its customers access to powerful AI models on top of what’s already available.

“Our partnership with OpenAI is a multi-year commercial partnership that focuses on reliability, performance, and real customer use. At the same time, we remain purpose-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 an important partner, and is one of the leading edge modeling providers available on Snowflake today, along with Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others.

Snowflake is not the only company to sign large contracts with several AI companies.

In January, the ServiceNow service management platform announced multi-year partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic for reasons very similar to Snowflake. ServiceNow president, COO and CPO Amit Zavery told TechCrunch at the time that working with both AI labs was intentional because they wanted to give their customers and employees the opportunity to choose the model they want based on the work they’re doing.

It’s hard to tell which AI companies are seeing the most adoption success so far.

A Research by Menlo Ventures from the end of 2025 shows his portfolio company Anthropic has a leading market; and Andreessen Horowitz report as of last week he naturally found his company OpenAI leading the pack.

This conflicting research makes it difficult to accurately track how businesses are using AI. However, these recent competitions provide a brief glimpse of what AI adoption looks like. The result: businesses will continue to partner with multiple AI companies because each offers a wide variety of languages ​​with different strengths and weaknesses.

Businesses can interact with multiple AI players because different AI companies and their major language models come with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Enterprise AI may be a market with multiple winners with a large customer base, similar to how many snowmobile users switch between Lyft and Uber depending on what is heard at the time. Example: Employees in these businesses already use their preferences regardless of their contracts.

Or maybe there will be a clear winner. But for now, it’s likely that we’ll see business ink deal with a number of players as they continue to search for where AI can bring tangible benefits.