Microsoft & Snowflake expand partnership with OpenAI

Snowflake has announced an expanded collaboration with Microsoft to bring OpenAI's models to its customers through Snowflake Cortex AI, enhancing the capabilities of the AI Data Cloud platform.

By integrating Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service within the Azure AI Foundry, Snowflake will offer its customers access to OpenAI's models across Microsoft Azure regions. These models are optimised to process audio, video, and text in real-time, enabling businesses to develop efficient data agents that operate within Snowflake's secure boundaries.

Christian Kleinerman, Executive Vice President of Product at Snowflake, commented, "We're expanding our long-standing partnership with Microsoft to deliver the best of OpenAI's innovations directly to our customers, further advancing our promise to bring easy, efficient, and trusted AI to enterprises around the world. There's enormous power in our customers being able to use OpenAI models directly in Snowflake's secure platform, unlocking multimodal, agentic, and conversational AI use cases that drive high impact."

This strategic move allows Snowflake to enhance its existing AI infrastructure by facilitating the use of OpenAI's advanced reasoning capabilities in various applications while maintaining robust security measures. Customers will now benefit from seamless cross-region and cross-cloud access to these technologies through the unified governance framework.

Asha Sharma, Corporate Vice President, Head of Product, Microsoft AI Platform, stated, "Enterprises are looking to leverage their proprietary data to create AI differentiation in ways that bring the richest experiences to the world, and the Snowflake partnership with Azure OpenAI Service through Azure AI Foundry will empower our joint customers to deliver intuitive and trustworthy app experiences even faster. It's our shared data-centric approach to AI that helps break down barriers to production for businesses of all sizes."

OpenAI's models, coupled with Snowflake's AI capabilities, will assist enterprises in overcoming common challenges associated with AI deployment, such as data governance and security, by making these services available within Cortex AI. This integration aligns with recent insights that underscore the importance of trust and security in successful AI initiatives.

The collaboration also allows joint customers of Snowflake and Microsoft to blend structured and unstructured data, enhancing user experience across applications. Plans are in place to expand the availability of OpenAI's models globally from their initial deployment in select Microsoft Azure regions in the United States.

Beyond OpenAI's offerings, Snowflake users will have access to a range of AI models from other prominent providers, facilitating a broad scope of AI applications within the Cortex AI environment.

In a related development, Snowflake and Microsoft are set to make Snowflake Cortex Agents available within Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams by June 2025. These agents, powered by Cortex AI, will enable enterprise customers to interact with Snowflake data in natural language through Microsoft applications. This feature is expected to streamline workflows and enhance productivity by making AI-driven insights more accessible.