Snowflake plans to spend as much as $200 million with OpenAI to bring its models and chatbot into the database vendor's sandbox and toolset. Features such as Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence will get a boost from the house of Altman.

"Snowflake is committing up to $200 million to purchase access to OpenAI's frontier models and ChatGPT Enterprise over the course of the multi-year agreement," Baris Gultekin, Snowflake's vice president of AI, told The Register . "This reflects Snowflake's conviction that providing OpenAI technology to our enterprise customer base, at scale and with enterprise-grade reliability, is strategically important. It is a commercial commitment anchored in real AI consumption by Snowflake customers, not a speculative or symbolic partnership."

Snowflake has previously allowed users of its data analytics and storage platform to access OpenAI through integration with Microsoft Azure, a service announced last year. This new integration lets them gain OpenAI's capabilities through Cortex AI as well as Snowflake Intelligence, giving them the ability to query and process their own data using natural language prompts.

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"Snowflake customers have been able to use OpenAI models before, but this partnership is different in that it's a direct, first-party partnership with OpenAI, rather than mediated through a cloud provider," Gultekin told The Register . "As a result, it establishes deep, first-party integration of OpenAI's frontier models directly into Snowflake's governed AI platform, paired with a multi-year commercial commitment that ensures reliability, performance, roadmap, and GTM alignment."

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Under the terms of the partnership, Snowflake and OpenAI engineering teams will now partner to bring new features to customers that leverage OpenAI Apps SDKs, AgentKit, and APIs that support shared enterprise workflows.

"With this new direct relationship established, the Snowflake and OpenAI teams can establish much tighter alignment across go-to-market efforts and co-innovation," Gultekin said.

[4]Snowflake gets frosty with Google Gemini

[5]Snowflake update caused a blizzard of failures worldwide

[6]Snowflake jumps on agentic AI train with Anthropic tie-up

[7]Snowflake goes all out to woo PostgreSQL developers with lakehouse extensions

This also brings OpenAI and ChatGPT 5.2 to Snowflake's two AI features that help users navigate their data: Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence. With Cortex AI, which includes Cortex Code, users can tap into the latest OpenAI models to analyze data. From rows and columns to text, images, and audio, teams can explore it all seamlessly using SQL, the familiar language of data they already trust.

Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake's executive vice president of product, told The Register that Cortex Code is a data-native AI coding agent that enables users to build, operate, and optimize data and AI workflows on Snowflake using natural language. It works directly with enterprise data, metadata, governance policies, and compute to generate executable outputs such as SQL, Python, data pipelines, ML workflows, and agent logic.

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He said Snowflake Intelligence is focused on data insights and decision-making. It allows users, especially non-technical users, to ask natural language questions and receive answers grounded in governed enterprise data and semantic models. Rather than creating new pipelines or applications, Snowflake Intelligence helps users explore and act on what already exists in their data environment.

"Cortex Code emphasizes reliability in building by producing inspectable, executable workflows that can be tested, validated, and deployed. Snowflake Intelligence emphasizes reliability in answering by grounding responses in enterprise data, metadata, RBAC, and semantic definitions," Kleinerman told The Register . "Together, Cortex Code enables teams to build trusted data and AI workflows, and Snowflake Intelligence enables users to ask questions and make decisions directly from governed enterprise data." ®

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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/06/snowflake_google_gemini_support/

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/18/snowflake_update_caused_a_blizzard/

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/04/anthropic_snowflake_agent_ai/

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[9] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/