Cloud data company Snowflake entered a $200 million multi-year AI deal with OpenAI on Monday, the latest signal that the business AI competition continues to heat up.

Under the agreement, Snowflake’s 12,600 customers will have access to OpenAI models across all three major cloud providers. Snowflake employees also access OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise. The two companies are also collaborating to build new AI agents and other AI products.

“By bringing OpenAI models to business data, Snowflake enables organizations to build and deploy AI on top of their most valuable assets using a secure, managed platform they trust,” said Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy in a press release. “Customers can now leverage all of their Snowflake business knowledge with the world-class intelligence of OpenAI models, enabling them to build AI agents that are powerful, responsible, and trustworthy. Together, we’re setting a new standard for AI innovation, helping businesses innovate with confidence, while maintaining strong security and standards compliance.”

OpenAI declined to share information on the deal beyond the press release.

If this deal sounds familiar, it should. Snowflake announced a $200 million business deal with AI research lab Anthropic at the beginning of December. At the time, Ramaswamy was quoted as making similar comments about how the partnership with Anthropic would give its customers access to powerful AI models on top of their existing data.

“Our partnership with OpenAI is a multi-year commercial commitment focused on reliability, performance, and real customer use. At the same time, we remain intentionally model-agnostic. Businesses need choice, and we don’t believe in locking customers into one provider,” Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake told TechCrunch via email. “OpenAI is an important partner, and it’s one of the many frontier model providers present in Snowflake today, along with Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others.

Snowflake isn’t the only business to sign big deals with big AI companies.

In January, the workflow automation platform ServiceNow announced a multi-year deal with OpenAI and Anthropic for very similar reasons as Snowflake. ServiceNow president, COO and CPO Amit Zavery told TechCrunch at the time that working with the two AI labs was intentional because they wanted to give their customers and employees the ability to choose which model they want based on the task at hand.

It’s hard to pinpoint which AI companies have seen the most success in business adoption to date.

A Menlo Ventures survey from late 2025 shows its portfolio company Anthropic holds a commanding market lead; the Andreessen Horowitz’s report from last week naturally found portfolio company OpenAI leading the pack.

These conflicting surveys make it difficult to accurately track trends in business AI use. However, this latest set of deals provides a glimpse into what enterprise AI adoption looks like. The result: businesses will continue to strike partnerships with many AI companies because each offers multiple language models with different strengths and weaknesses.

Businesses tend to collaborate with multiple AI players because different AI companies and their major language models have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Enterprise AI can quickly become a multi-winner market with an overlapping customer base, similar to how many ride-hail users switch between Lyft and Uber based on what’s most important for that moment. Case in point: the employees of these businesses are already using their preferred model regardless of their company contracts.

Or maybe there is a clear winner after all. But for now, we’re likely to see businesses ink deals with more players as they continue to explore where AI can provide real value.