Snowflake Lets Enterprises Build OpenAI Agents Directly on Proprietary Data

Snowflake and OpenAI announced a multi-year, $200 million partnership on February 2, 2026. The deal embeds OpenAI models into Snowflake's Cortex AI platform. Snowflake will invest the funds to speed enterprise AI development. Customers can run models like GPT-4o and o1 on their data warehouses. Cortex AI, Snowflake's serverless AI service, will support Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), fine-tuning, and agentic workflows. Enterprises can process proprietary data in place to avoid data movement and compliance risks from external APIs. The integration enables secure, scalable inference with Snowflake governance, including row-level security and dynamic data masking. Snowflake positions Cortex as a hub for production AI agents against platforms such as Databricks. Early access starts with select customers; general availability is planned for later in 2026.

Why It Matters

• Data engineers can build and deploy OpenAI-powered agents directly in Cortex, eliminating data export latency and compliance hurdles starting Q2 2026.
• ML engineers get in-platform access to o1 models for RAG and fine-tuning on proprietary datasets, shortening integration time from weeks to days.
• Platform teams can enforce enterprise governance on AI workloads—applying row-level security and dynamic masking to agent outputs without custom tooling.
• SOC analysts gain built-in observability for model inference, reducing audit and monitoring overhead in regulated environments.