Snowflake Strikes Strategic Deal To Bring Anthropic’s AI Models To Its AI Data Cloud

Snowflake also announces key acquisition that will add advanced data integration capabilities to the Snowflake cloud platform to support structured and unstructured data.

AI data cloud company Snowflake has struck a multi-year strategic partnership with AI startup Anthropic under which Anthropic’s Claude AI models will be available through Snowflake Cortex AI, the company’s fully managed suite of AI services.

Snowflake also said it is acquiring Datavolo, a developer of advanced data integration technology for developing “multimodal data pipelines.” The acquisition is expected to make it easier to bring more types of data into the Snowflake platform for AI, data analytics and other tasks.

The Anthropic and Datavolo announcements came just before Snowflake announced its fiscal 2025 third quarter results that included revenue of $942.1 million, up more than 28 percent from $734.2 million one year ago. That included $900.3 million in product revenue, a 29 percent gain year over year.

Snowflake said the alliance with Anthropic will enable enterprise customers to “develop and scale easy, efficient, and trusted AI products, apps, and workflows” powered by the Anthropic models.

Through the deal with Anthropic the company’s Claude models, including its latest Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, will be available to the Snowflake Cortex AI services that run on Amazon Web Services. Snowflake’s agentic AI products, including Cortex Analyst and the recently announced Snowflake Intelligence.

“This gives enterprises the choice to build cutting edge AI applications using the model of their choice with the ease [and] built-in security and governance of the snowflake platform [and] the cost efficiency, flexibility and extensibility we deliver,” Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy (pictured) said during the earnings call Wednesday.

By bringing Anthropic Claude models together with the Snowflake platform can better unlock the value of their data through conversational assistants and large-scale language processing, Snowflake said.

“Claude’s advanced language models will further enhance how data agents in Snowflake can deeply analyze data, run ad-hoc analytics, generate visualizations, and execute other multi-step workflows,” Snowflake said in the Anthropic announcement. “In turn, Snowflake’s Horizon Catalog’s strong enterprise-grade compliance, security, privacy, discovery, and collaboration capabilities are natively integrated into Cortex AI — so users can harness the latest Claude 3.5 models with granular access controls and governance guardrails, enabling them to deliver trustworthy AI with high-accuracy results.”

As part of the multi-year partnership, Snowflake has also committed to using Claude as one of the key models powering its agentic AI offerings. Snowflake’s enterprise AI products and chatbots will come optimized for Claude out-of-the-box, so users can reduce time-to-market and begin seeing value with industry-leading accuracy and scalability.

“Our partnership with Anthropic represents a massive leap forward in expanding on our promise to provide thousands of global customers with easy, efficient, and trusted AI for a holistic set of enterprise use cases,” said Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake executive vice president of product, in a statement.

“By bringing Anthropic’s industry-leading models to customers’ enterprise data where it already lives, within the security and governance boundaries of the AI Data Cloud, we will unleash new ways for businesses to harness this data for agentic use cases, coding assistants, document chatbots, unstructured data analytics, and more,” Kleinerman said.

Snowflake said the acquisition of Datavolo will help the company provide a simple way for data engineering teams to integrate all of their enterprise systems with Snowflake’s AI data Cloud unified platform and use it for AI and ML tasks, applications, and data analytics.

Datavolo provides a single platform for automating and managing both structured and unstructured data flows between various enterprise data sources. Its software is powered by Apache NiFi, secure data processing and distribution technology that was originally developed and then open-sourced by the National Security Agency.

Once fully integrated into the Snowflake platform, Datavolo will form the basis of Snowflake’s open and extensible connectivity platform for structured and unstructured data, allowing Snowflake to further its offering for data engineering workloads, the company said.

Users will be able to replace the complexity and maintenance burden of single-use, point-to-point connectors with fast, flexible, reusable pipelines that allow unstructured and structured data to more seamlessly move from cloud and on-premises sources to Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, according to the company.

Because Datavolo is widely used across federal government agencies and organizations, Snowflake said the acquisition is also expected to help the company grow its public sector business.

Financial terms of the Datavolo acquisition were not disclosed.

The Anthropic deal and Datavolo acquisition news comes a week after Snowflake unveiled a wave of new AI development and security capabilities at the company’s Build 2024 virtual conference for developers.

Topping the list of announcements was the Snowflake Intelligence platform, a low-code system for developing AI data agents through which business users can query their data using natural language and then take action based on the results. Snowflake is slated to be available soon for private preview.

Snowflake also debuted at Build a number of additions to Snowflake Cortex AI and Snowflake ML that the company said makes it easier to build multimodal, conversational AI applications with more diverse data sources and native agent-based orchestration. And Snowflake added new threat prevention and security monitoring capabilities to the Snowflake Horizon Catalog.