Snowflake Expands Microsoft Partnership with OpenAI Integration

This collaboration will allow enterprises to build AI-powered applications and data agents with OpenAI’s state-of-the-art models directly within Snowflake’s platform. By integrating Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service through Azure AI Foundry, businesses will be able to use OpenAI’s advanced models for real-time analysis across audio, video, and text, all within Snowflake on Microsoft Azure regions. This integration ensures that enterprises can access OpenAI’s powerful AI models in a secure, efficient, and trusted environment.

Snowflake Cortex AI’s integration with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service enables businesses to easily create secure AI-powered data agents within Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, providing seamless access to OpenAI’s multimodal models for real-time data analysis. This collaboration further strengthens Snowflake’s leadership in delivering cutting-edge AI solutions while providing a unified governance framework to manage enterprise data. By bringing OpenAI’s models directly into the Snowflake platform, businesses can unlock AI-powered solutions that save time and reduce costs, while benefiting from advanced reasoning and instruct capabilities that drive scalable AI applications.

Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product at Snowflake, stated, “We’re expanding our long-standing partnership with Microsoft to deliver the best of OpenAI’s innovations directly to our customers, unlocking powerful AI use cases that drive high impact.” Snowflake’s cross-region and cross-cloud AI inference capabilities ensure that businesses can access OpenAI’s models globally without complex integrations, making it easier for enterprises to deploy AI solutions across different cloud providers and regions. Snowflake’s deep integration with Microsoft Azure provides secure connections, protecting sensitive data while delivering trusted AI-powered insights.

A recent MIT Technology Review Insights report highlighted data governance, security, and privacy as major challenges for businesses adopting generative AI. By integrating OpenAI’s models with Snowflake Cortex AI via Azure OpenAI Service, Snowflake ensures that businesses can maintain strong data governance, access controls, and monitoring, making it easier to protect proprietary data. Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud allows companies to combine structured and unstructured data, creating richer, more engaging user experiences. OpenAI’s models will initially be available on select Microsoft Azure regions in the United States, with plans to expand globally.

In addition to OpenAI’s models, Snowflake offers various AI models from leading providers like Anthropic, DeepSeek, Meta, Mistral, and more, alongside Snowflake’s Arctic open-source language and embedding models. This approach ensures that businesses have access to the best-performing models and the flexibility to choose the right model for their needs.

As part of the expanded partnership, Snowflake will also bring its Cortex Agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams, expected to be generally available in June 2025. These AI-powered agents will allow users to interact with Snowflake data using natural language directly within Microsoft apps, boosting productivity and enabling smarter decision-making. Developers will also be able to integrate Snowflake data into Microsoft 365 apps using REST APIs, while data teams can leverage Cortex AI within Microsoft Copilot to accelerate business insights.

This expanded partnership between Snowflake and Microsoft enables enterprises to leverage cutting-edge AI technology, delivering powerful and secure AI-driven insights with ease. By integrating OpenAI’s models into the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, Snowflake continues to simplify AI adoption, providing businesses with the tools to create innovative AI-powered applications and drive transformation.