Snowflake Securely Integrates Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to Provide Access to the Latest OpenAI Models with Expanded Microsoft Partnership
Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) has expanded its strategic partnership with Microsoft to integrate Azure OpenAI Service into Snowflake Cortex AI. This integration will enable enterprises to build AI-powered applications and data agents using OpenAI's models directly within Snowflake's secure platform.
The partnership includes two key developments: (1) OpenAI's models will be available through Azure AI Foundry in select U.S. Azure regions, with plans for global expansion, and (2) Snowflake Cortex Agents will be integrated with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, with general availability expected in June 2025.
The integration provides enterprise customers with secure access to OpenAI's models within Snowflake's governance framework, allowing for cross-region and cross-cloud AI inference without complex setup. The solution addresses key enterprise concerns, as 59% of companies cite data governance, security, or privacy as challenges in deploying generative AI.
Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) ha ampliato la sua partnership strategica con Microsoft per integrare il servizio Azure OpenAI in Snowflake Cortex AI. Questa integrazione consentirà alle aziende di creare applicazioni e agenti di dati alimentati da AI utilizzando i modelli di OpenAI direttamente all'interno della piattaforma sicura di Snowflake.
La partnership include due sviluppi chiave: (1) i modelli di OpenAI saranno disponibili tramite Azure AI Foundry in alcune regioni statunitensi di Azure, con piani per un'espansione globale, e (2) gli agenti Snowflake Cortex saranno integrati con Microsoft 365 Copilot e Teams, con disponibilità generale prevista per giugno 2025.
L'integrazione offre ai clienti aziendali un accesso sicuro ai modelli di OpenAI all'interno del framework di governance di Snowflake, consentendo l'inferenza AI tra regioni e cloud senza configurazioni complesse. La soluzione affronta le principali preoccupazioni delle aziende, poiché il 59% delle aziende cita la governance dei dati, la sicurezza o la privacy come sfide nell'implementazione dell'AI generativa.
Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) ha ampliado su asociación estratégica con Microsoft para integrar el servicio Azure OpenAI en Snowflake Cortex AI. Esta integración permitirá a las empresas construir aplicaciones y agentes de datos impulsados por AI utilizando los modelos de OpenAI directamente dentro de la plataforma segura de Snowflake.
La asociación incluye dos desarrollos clave: (1) los modelos de OpenAI estarán disponibles a través de Azure AI Foundry en regiones seleccionadas de Azure en EE. UU., con planes de expansión global, y (2) los Agentes de Snowflake Cortex se integrarán con Microsoft 365 Copilot y Teams, con disponibilidad general esperada para junio de 2025.
La integración proporciona a los clientes empresariales acceso seguro a los modelos de OpenAI dentro del marco de gobernanza de Snowflake, permitiendo la inferencia de AI entre regiones y nubes sin configuraciones complejas. La solución aborda las principales preocupaciones empresariales, ya que el 59% de las empresas citan la gobernanza de datos, la seguridad o la privacidad como desafíos en la implementación de AI generativa.
Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW)는 Microsoft와의 전략적 파트너십을 확장하여 Azure OpenAI 서비스를 Snowflake Cortex AI에 통합했습니다. 이 통합은 기업들이 Snowflake의 안전한 플랫폼 내에서 OpenAI 모델을 사용하여 AI 기반 애플리케이션과 데이터 에이전트를 구축할 수 있게 해줍니다.
이 파트너십에는 두 가지 주요 발전이 포함됩니다: (1) OpenAI 모델이 미국의 특정 Azure 지역에서 Azure AI Foundry를 통해 제공되며, 글로벌 확장 계획이 있으며, (2) Snowflake Cortex 에이전트가 Microsoft 365 Copilot 및 Teams와 통합되어 2025년 6월에 일반 제공될 예정입니다.
이 통합은 기업 고객에게 Snowflake의 거버넌스 프레임워크 내에서 OpenAI 모델에 대한 안전한 접근을 제공하여 복잡한 설정 없이 지역 간 및 클라우드 간 AI 추론을 가능하게 합니다. 이 솔루션은 59%의 기업이 생성 AI 배포 시 데이터 거버넌스, 보안 또는 개인 정보 보호를 도전 과제로 인식하고 있다는 점에서 주요 기업 우려를 해결합니다.
Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) a élargi son partenariat stratégique avec Microsoft pour intégrer le service Azure OpenAI dans Snowflake Cortex AI. Cette intégration permettra aux entreprises de créer des applications et des agents de données alimentés par l'IA en utilisant les modèles d'OpenAI directement au sein de la plateforme sécurisée de Snowflake.
Le partenariat comprend deux développements clés : (1) les modèles d'OpenAI seront disponibles via Azure AI Foundry dans certaines régions américaines d'Azure, avec des plans d'expansion mondiale, et (2) les agents de Snowflake Cortex seront intégrés à Microsoft 365 Copilot et Teams, avec une disponibilité générale prévue pour juin 2025.
L'intégration offre aux clients entreprises un accès sécurisé aux modèles d'OpenAI dans le cadre de gouvernance de Snowflake, permettant une inférence IA entre régions et clouds sans configuration complexe. La solution répond aux principales préoccupations des entreprises, car 59 % d'entre elles citent la gouvernance des données, la sécurité ou la confidentialité comme des défis dans le déploiement de l'IA générative.
Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) hat seine strategische Partnerschaft mit Microsoft erweitert, um den Azure OpenAI Service in Snowflake Cortex AI zu integrieren. Diese Integration ermöglicht es Unternehmen, KI-gestützte Anwendungen und Datenagenten mit den Modellen von OpenAI direkt innerhalb der sicheren Plattform von Snowflake zu erstellen.
Die Partnerschaft umfasst zwei wesentliche Entwicklungen: (1) Die Modelle von OpenAI werden über Azure AI Foundry in ausgewählten US-Azure-Regionen verfügbar sein, mit Plänen zur globalen Expansion, und (2) Snowflake Cortex Agents werden mit Microsoft 365 Copilot und Teams integriert, wobei die allgemeine Verfügbarkeit für Juni 2025 erwartet wird.
Die Integration bietet Unternehmenskunden sicheren Zugang zu den Modellen von OpenAI innerhalb des Governance-Rahmens von Snowflake, was KI-Inferenz über Regionen und Clouds hinweg ohne komplexe Einrichtung ermöglicht. Die Lösung adressiert zentrale Unternehmensbedenken, da 59 % der Unternehmen Daten-Governance, Sicherheit oder Datenschutz als Herausforderungen bei der Einführung generativer KI angeben.
- Strategic partnership with Microsoft enhances AI capabilities
- Integration provides secure access to OpenAI models within existing infrastructure
- Cross-region and cross-cloud AI inference capability without complex setup
- New revenue potential through Microsoft 365 Copilot integration
- initial availability only in select U.S. Azure regions
- Microsoft 365 integration not available until June 2025
Insights
Snowflake's expanded partnership with Microsoft represents a significant strategic advancement in the company's AI capabilities, positioning it more competitively in the rapidly evolving enterprise AI infrastructure market. By integrating Azure OpenAI Service directly into Snowflake Cortex AI, the company addresses a critical market need: enabling AI implementation without compromising data security and governance - a primary concern for
This integration creates several strategic advantages for Snowflake:
- Enhanced competitive differentiation against rivals like Databricks by offering seamless access to frontier AI models within Snowflake's existing security perimeter
- Potential acceleration of enterprise AI adoption by eliminating complex integration requirements that typically slow implementation
- Expanded total addressable market by enabling multimodal AI applications (processing audio, video, and text) directly within customers' existing data infrastructure
The forthcoming Microsoft 365 Copilot integration (targeted for June 2025) further strengthens Snowflake's value proposition by embedding AI-powered data insights directly into workflows where business decisions happen. This creates a compelling stickiness factor that could improve customer retention and potentially increase consumption-based revenue as organizations build more AI applications on the platform.
From a business perspective, this partnership strategically positions Snowflake to capture more of the enterprise AI spending by offering a unified solution for data storage, governance, and AI model deployment. The partnership effectively transforms Snowflake from primarily a data warehouse into an end-to-end AI application development platform, potentially opening new revenue streams as customers build and deploy AI agents within their Snowflake environment.
This expanded Microsoft partnership significantly strengthens Snowflake's competitive positioning in the enterprise AI platform market by addressing the most critical barrier to AI adoption: securely connecting proprietary data with advanced AI models while maintaining governance controls. For Snowflake, this represents both a defensive and offensive strategic move.
Strategic business implications:
- The integration creates a compelling differentiation in the increasingly competitive data cloud market, where Snowflake faces pressure from Databricks and major cloud providers
- By embedding OpenAI's capabilities directly within Snowflake's environment, the company creates a stronger retention mechanism as customers build AI applications that would be difficult to migrate
- The partnership potentially accelerates consumption-based revenue by enabling new AI workloads that typically require significant computational resources
The cross-cloud, cross-region capabilities are particularly significant for multinational enterprises navigating complex data sovereignty requirements, potentially giving Snowflake an advantage in serving global organizations with distributed data environments.
While the Microsoft 365 integration's June 2025 availability suggests some implementation complexity, the core Azure OpenAI Service integration appears to be available sooner, providing near-term competitive advantages. This phased approach allows Snowflake to demonstrate immediate value while building toward deeper workflow integration.
From a market perspective, this partnership positions Snowflake as a neutral AI platform with enterprise-grade security, potentially attracting organizations hesitant to commit fully to a single cloud provider's AI stack. By offering a secure environment where enterprises can leverage multiple AI models (including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others) within existing data governance frameworks, Snowflake addresses the primary concern cited by
- Snowflake strengthens strategic partnership with Microsoft to deliver OpenAI’s state-of-the-art models directly to customers in Snowflake Cortex AI on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry
- Snowflake also launches new native integration enabling thousands of customers to seamlessly leverage Snowflake Cortex Agents within their Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 apps
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Snowflake Securely Integrates Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to Provide Access to the Latest OpenAI Models with Expanded Microsoft Partnership (Graphic: Business Wire)
“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,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product, Snowflake. “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.”
By bringing OpenAI’s models to Cortex AI through an integration with Azure OpenAI Service, Snowflake further solidifies its leadership in providing users with frontier AI models within the same unified governance framework as their data. Snowflake’s cross-region and cross-cloud AI inference also enables global customers to seamlessly access OpenAI’s models from any cloud or region, without needing complex integrations or manual setup. Access to these models is secured with Snowflake's strong security guarantees through deep integrations with Microsoft Azure, providing protected connections for customers on any cloud provider. OpenAI’s models provide advanced reasoning and instruct capabilities, allowing users to quickly build scalable AI apps and data agents that deliver accurate, grounded insights using their enterprise data. Snowflake customers achieve this because OpenAI’s models run within the security boundary of Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud. Snowflake Horizon Catalog’s strong enterprise-grade compliance, security, privacy, discovery, and collaboration capabilities natively integrated into Cortex AI allows users to focus on driving impact with OpenAI’s models.
“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,” said Asha Sharma, CVP, Head of Product, Microsoft AI Platform. “It’s our shared data-centric approach to AI that helps break down barriers to production for businesses of all sizes.”
Introducing OpenAI to the AI Data Cloud Through Azure OpenAI Service Integration
According to a recent MIT Technology Review Insights report, Data Strategies for AI Leaders,
With OpenAI’s models in the AI Data Cloud, joint customers of Snowflake and Microsoft can now seamlessly combine structured and unstructured data to deliver a richer, more engaging user experience. OpenAI’s models will be available on select Microsoft Azure regions in
In addition to OpenAI’s models, Snowflake offers various models from leading providers including Anthropic, DeepSeek, Meta, Mistral, and more, alongside Snowflake’s Arctic open source language and embedding models. Snowflake is committed to making the top-performing models seamlessly accessible to users within Cortex AI, allowing customers the choice and flexibility to select the best model for their specific use case.
Snowflake Brings Data Agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams
Through this expanded partnership, Snowflake is collaborating with Microsoft to make Snowflake Cortex Agents available for end users in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams (anticipated general availability in June 2025). Powered by Cortex AI, Cortex Agents will allow Microsoft’s enterprise customers to interact with their structured and unstructured Snowflake data in natural language directly from within Microsoft apps — streamlining their ability to ask questions and get insights from the core Microsoft tools they use every day. With this integration, AI-driven insights become more accessible for users at every skill level, improving productivity and helping fuel better decision-making across the enterprise. Additionally, developers can also leverage these Snowflake features through convenient REST APIs to customize and build secure natural language interfaces between Microsoft 365 apps and their data in Snowflake. Leading data and engineering teams will be able to leverage Cortex AI through Microsoft Copilot to accelerate business insights.
Learn More:
- Explore how Snowflake and Microsoft’s partnership is propelling customers’ AI journeys forward.
- Learn more about Snowflake’s commitment to customer data and AI safety in order to keep Snowflake customers’ data private and secure on the Snowflake AI Terms page.
- See which large language models are available to global users in Snowflake Cortex AI, alongside their regional availability through Snowflake Documentation.
- Check out how global enterprises are unlocking the future of data agents for structured and unstructured data with Snowflake's new Cortex Agents.
- Dig into how industry-leaders like Bayer and Siemens Energy use generative AI to increase revenue, improve productivity, and better serve end users in this Secrets of Gen AI Success ebook.
- Stay on top of the latest news and announcements from Snowflake on LinkedIn and X.
Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains express and implied forward-looking statements, including statements regarding (i) Snowflake’s business strategy, (ii) Snowflake’s products, services, and technology offerings, including those that are under development or not generally available, (iii) market growth, trends, and competitive considerations, (iv) the integration, interoperability, and availability of Snowflake’s products with and on third-party platforms, and (v) the proposed strategic partnership with Microsoft. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including (i) risks related to unforeseen technical, operational, or business challenges impacting the timing, scope, or success of our strategic partnerships and (ii) the risks described under the heading “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and the Annual Reports on Form 10-K that Snowflake files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In light of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements. As a result, you should not rely on any forward-looking statements as predictions of future events.
© 2025 Snowflake Inc. All rights reserved. Snowflake, the Snowflake logo, and all other Snowflake product, feature and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Snowflake Inc. in
About Snowflake
Snowflake makes enterprise AI easy, efficient and trusted. More than 11,000 companies around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to share data, build applications, and power their business with AI. The era of enterprise AI is here. Learn more at snowflake.com (NYSE: SNOW).
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250226499406/en/
Media Contact:
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Senior Product PR Lead, Snowflake
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Source: Snowflake Inc.
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