Snowflake made a series of bold moves toward open source, interoperability and customization in AI and data on Day 1 of its annual Summit on Monday. The announcements position the AI data cloud company as a vanguard for enterprises embracing the AI revolution through open solutions.
The headliner was Snowflake’s expanded collaboration with NVIDIA to power customized, industry-specific AI applications. The companies are integrating NVIDIA’s AI software like NeMo Retriever into Snowflake’s Cortex AI platform.
“Pairing NVIDIA’s full stack accelerated computing and software with Snowflake’s state-of-the-art AI capabilities in Cortex AI is game-changing,” said Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy. “Together, we are unlocking a new era of AI where customers from every industry and every skill level can build custom AI applications on their enterprise data with ease, efficiency, and trust.”
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang echoed the importance of this partnership for enterprise AI, stating “Data is the essential raw material of the AI industrial revolution. Together, NVIDIA and Snowflake will help enterprises refine their proprietary business data and transform it into valuable generative AI.”
The collaboration allows enterprises to connect custom AI models to their business data within Snowflake for highly accurate, tailored applications. It opens the door for partners like Quantiphi to build native apps using NVIDIA AI that run fully operational within a customer’s Snowflake environment.
Snowflake also announced expanded support for its open source Arctic large language model, now optimized for NVIDIA chips and available as a downloadable service.
Another major reveal was Snowflake’s new Polaris Catalog, an open source catalog implementation for the Apache Iceberg data table format that is becoming the industry standard.
“Organizations want open storage and interoperable query engines without lock-in,” said Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake EVP of Product. “With support from leaders like AWS, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce, we are simplifying how any organization can access data across systems with flexibility and control.”
Microsoft’s Arun Ulagaratchagan, Corporate VP of Azure Data, highlighted their “joint mission of enabling all users to harness their open Iceberg data to create AI applications at scale.”
The announcements reinforce Snowflake’s commitment to openness and interoperability as enterprises navigate lock-in risks while adopting AI and modern data strategies.
As CEO Ramaswamy stated, Snowflake is positioning itself to make “enterprise AI easy, efficient and trusted” for customers across industries. Their Summit set the stage for a wave of new open data collaboration in the AI era. Enterprises will be watching closely for any further announcements from Day 2 of the conference.