Snowflake signs $6 billion AWS deal to boost AI chip access

Snowflake’s $6 billion AWS commitment is another sign that cloud giants are trying to loosen Nvidia’s grip on AI infrastructure by controlling more of the chip stack themselves. The five-year agreement, announced May 27, is Snowflake’s largest infrastructure commitment to date and ties the company more tightly to Amazon Web Services’ Graviton processors and AI chip infrastructure.

Snowflake said the collaboration builds on a relationship that started 11 years ago on AWS, with most of its customers already running there today. The company also said it has surpassed $7 billion in lifetime AWS Marketplace sales. Under the expanded pact, Snowflake and AWS said they will deepen product integrations across generative AI and agentic AI, widen go-to-market efforts through AWS Marketplace, and invest jointly in customer success, workload migrations and strategic industry solutions.

Snowflake also plans to expand its use of Amazon’s Graviton chips and cloud-based GPUs for AI. The $6 billion commitment works out to an average of about $1.2 billion a year, underscoring how aggressively Snowflake is scaling its infrastructure as it pushes harder into enterprise AI. Unlike some other large AI infrastructure deals Amazon has struck, this arrangement does not include an equity investment.

The deal lands as Amazon has been building out AWS as a central AI platform. In April, Anthropic said it aimed to spend more than $100 billion on AWS over a decade, and Amazon also has a separate arrangement with OpenAI. Snowflake’s move suggests the cloud market is becoming a contest not just over software, but over who supplies the compute, processors and preferred pathways for AI workloads at scale.

Snowflake also delivered stronger-than-expected quarterly results alongside the announcement. The company reported fiscal first-quarter adjusted earnings of 39 cents per share on revenue of $1.39 billion, up 33% from a year earlier, and guided to product revenue of $1.415 billion to $1.420 billion for fiscal Q2. Shares rose as much as 30% in extended trading after the disclosure.

The size of the new agreement also marks a sharp jump from Snowflake’s earlier AWS-related commitment, which was disclosed at its 2020 initial public offering as a $1.2 billion deal over five years and later increased to $2.5 billion in 2023. That progression shows both Snowflake’s growth and AWS’s ability to keep more of the AI stack inside its own ecosystem.

The next major test comes at Snowflake Summit 26, which runs June 1 to June 4 in San Francisco, where the company is expected to press its enterprise AI strategy in front of customers and partners.