Snowflake Signs $6B Deal with AWS for AI CPU Chips

Cloud data storage giant Snowflake has signed a new $6 billion five-year agreement with Amazon Web Services, the companies announced on Wednesday. This deal is a significant win for AWS, as Snowflake has sold $7 billion worth of its services via AWS Marketplace total since it was founded in 2012, making this new contract close to all the money it has ever brought in from that cloud. The growth in spending is driven by AI, with Snowflake's customers accelerating their spending on AWS, doubling in 2025 to $2 billion for that calendar year alone.

Snowflake has been offering its AI building tool, Cortex AI, for a couple of years now, which provides features like a text interface for database queries, summary reports, and more. Of particular note is that Snowflake is signing this contract for more access to AWS's home-grown ARM-based CPU chip, Graviton. As AI moves from training to daily usage to automation via agents, CPU usage skyrockets, and Graviton chips are a more affordable option for AWS to deploy.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy last month boasted that Amazon's own homegrown AI chips offer "better price-performance" than Nvidia's offerings. These deals are luring in new multi-billion-dollar contracts, with AWS signing a deal to provide millions of Graviton chips to Meta for its growing AI compute needs last month. This is a significant win for AWS, as Meta had signed a $10 billion deal with Google Cloud a few months earlier.

The rise of AI-specific CPUs from cloud giants is also serving as notice to Nvidia that competitive CPUs are attempting to come for its lunch. Google has also been making its own AI chips for years, and Microsoft just launched its Maia AI chip in January. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last week that he's more than ready to defend, and even grow, his turf, with the new AI-specific CPU, Vera, representing a 'brand new" $200 billion market for Nvidia.

The cloud providers are getting their share of the AI boom, with AWS's multi-billion-dollar cloud deals showing how AI is lifting its boat. Whichever companies benefit most from the rise of AI in our work and home lives, the cloud providers are reaping the rewards.