Snowflake Deepens AWS Tie-Up As AI Data War With Databricks Escalates

Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) dropped a one-two punch Wednesday evening: a blowout quarter and a $6 billion commitment to Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) AWS that signals the company is making a clear strategic bet on where the AI infrastructure war will be won.

• SNOW stock is soaring after earnings. See the price action here. 

AWS Commitment

The new multi-year deal — announced alongside first-quarter results that sent SNOW shares surging more than 35% — calls for Snowflake to spend $6 billion on AWS’s Graviton compute and AI services over the next five years. 

That implies roughly $1.2 billion in annual AWS spend, a dramatic escalation from the $2.5 billion arrangement the companies held as of 2023, according to CNBC.  

The partnership isn’t just a spend commitment. The agreement expands joint go-to-market efforts, deeper product integrations across generative and agentic AI, and shared customer success programs aimed at migrating enterprises onto a combined AI stack. 

Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy framed it plainly: the AWS deal is about bringing AI to governed data at enterprise scale. 

AWS CEO Matt Garman echoed the pitch, calling the partnership critical for customers that need to scale both data warehousing and AI workloads simultaneously.

The timing is deliberate. Snowflake is accelerating its AWS integration precisely as Databricks — its most dangerous rival — has pushed aggressively into AI application and agent database products. 

Databricks has long held an edge on the machine learning and data engineering side, and it has been closing the gap on SQL analytics. 

By locking in deeper AWS infrastructure and chip-level integration — specifically Amazon’s Arm-based Graviton processors — Snowflake is hardening its moat where Databricks has less footing, according to Constellation Research. 

Natoma Acquisition

Snowflake also announced the acquisition of Natoma, an enterprise Model Context Protocol platform for AI agents. 

The move is directly tied to the AWS strategy: Natoma brings identity governance and privileged access management to Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, extending what Ramaswamy called a “trust layer” to AI-driven actions and workflows. 

“Whoever governs agents, context, and autonomous actions wins the agentic era. Natoma gives Snowflake the missing layer between insight and execution,” said Mike Ni, analyst at Constellation Research.  

As agentic AI grows from chatbot novelty to enterprise infrastructure, the governance question becomes central — and Snowflake is trying to own that answer.

The company also reported 13,600-plus accounts using Snowflake AI and remaining performance obligations (RPO) of $9.21 billion, up 38% year over year — a figure that suggests the AWS-anchored AI strategy is already showing up in the forward book.

The AWS deal is Snowflake's declaration that the data cloud battle will be fought on AI infrastructure, and that Snowflake is choosing sides early.

SNOW Stock Price Activity: Snowflake stock was up 35.46% at $237.40 at the time of publication Thursday, according to Benzinga Pro.

Over the past month, SNOW has gained about 63.6% versus a 5.9% rise in the S&P 500 and is up roughly 8% year-to-date compared to the index’s 9.9% gain.

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