Snowflake Commits $200M to Embed GPT-5.2, Bringing AI Models Directly to Enterprise Data

Snowflake Commits $200M to Embed GPT-5.2, Bringing AI Models Directly to Enterprise Data

Snowflake and OpenAI have formalized a multi-year, $200 million partnership that embeds GPT-5.2 directly into Snowflake's data platform, fundamentally changing how enterprises can deploy AI on their governed data.

The "Bring the Model to the Data" Approach

The traditional enterprise AI architecture requires extracting data, shipping it to an external LLM endpoint, and hoping nothing sensitive leaks in transit. Snowflake's new approach inverts this model—instead of shipping data to intelligence, you ship intelligence to the data.

"This architecture solves the biggest blocker to enterprise AI adoption: data governance," said Baris Gultekin, Snowflake's VP of AI. "Data has to be moved, access controls re-implemented, and governance often becomes an afterthought."

What's Now Available

The partnership enables several new capabilities for Snowflake's 12,600+ enterprise customers:

Cortex AI Functions

Teams can call OpenAI models from standard SQL, applying multimodal reasoning to structured tables, text columns, images, and audio without writing Python or managing API keys.

Snowflake Intelligence

A no-code agentic interface where authorized employees can ask natural-language questions. The agent automatically retrieves and synthesizes answers grounded in the Snowflake Horizon Catalog, respecting existing RBAC rules.

AgentKit Integration

Snowflake and OpenAI engineering teams will co-build new agentic capabilities using OpenAI's AgentKit, enabling multi-step autonomous workflows across enterprise data estates.

Enterprise Benefits

• •99.99% SLA on model access vs. intermittent reliability of standard public API endpoints
• •Native RBAC enforcement without duplicating access control implementations
• •Single governed environment reduces the AI data stack from 3-5 vendor relationships to one
• •2.3x faster batch processing in internal benchmarks vs. equivalent Python loops

The Bigger Picture

The $200M commitment mirrors Snowflake's parallel $200M deal with Anthropic in December 2025, representing a combined $400M bet that data platform-native AI will displace middleware AI startups that previously served as wrappers around model APIs.

For organizations already running on Snowflake, Cortex AI Functions calling GPT-5.2 from plain SQL against existing tables is now a shorter path to production than building a custom RAG pipeline from scratch.

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Sources:

• •Snowflake Commits $200M to Embed GPT-5.2 (Business Analytics Substack)