Cloud data company Snowflake signed a $200 million multi-year AI contract with OpenAI on Monday, the latest sign that enterprise AI competition continues to heat up.
The deal gives Snowflake’s 12,600 customers access to OpenAI models from all three major cloud providers. Snowflake employees also have access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise. The companies are also partnering to build new AI agents and other AI products.
Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said in a press release: “By bringing OpenAI models to enterprise data, Snowflake enables organizations to build and deploy AI on top of their most valuable assets using a secure, governed platform they already trust.” We set new standards for innovation and help you transform your business with confidence while maintaining strong security and compliance standards.”
OpenAI declined to share information about the deal beyond the press release.
If this trade sounds familiar to you, you should. Snowflake announced a $200 million corporate deal with AI research institute Anthropic in early December. At the time, Ramaswamy reportedly made very similar comments about how the partnership with Anthropic would give 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-world customer usage. At the same time, we are intentionally model agnostic. Enterprises 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 is currently one of several frontier model providers available on Snowflake, along with Anthropic, Google, Meta, and more.
Snowflake isn’t the only company with large contracts 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 as Snowflake. Amit Zaveri, ServiceNow’s president, chief operating officer and chief operating officer, told TechCrunch at the time that the collaboration with both AI labs was intentional because the company wanted customers and employees to be able to choose the model they wanted based on the task at hand.
So far, it’s difficult to determine which AI companies have been most successful in enterprise deployments.
Menlo Ventures’ late 2025 research shows that its portfolio company Anthropic holds a commanding lead in the market. Andreessen Horowitz’s report last week found that, unsurprisingly, its portfolio company OpenAI is leading the way.
These conflicting studies make it difficult to accurately track trends in enterprise AI usage. However, this latest round of deals provides a near-term view of what AI adoption in enterprises will look like. As a result, companies will continue to partner with multiple AI companies, as each company offers large language models with different strengths and weaknesses.
Companies will likely partner with multiple AI players, as different AI companies and their large-scale language models each have their own strengths and weaknesses.
Enterprise AI could become a market with multiple winners with overlapping customer bases, similar to how ride-hailing users move back and forth between Lyft and Uber based on what makes the most sense in the moment. Case in point: Employees at these companies already use their preferred model, regardless of company contracts.
Or maybe there will be a clear winner in the end. But for now, companies will likely sign deals with multiple companies as they continue to explore where AI can provide tangible value.
