Snowflake is making an aggressive push to position itself at the center of enterprise “agentic AI,” announcing both the plan to acquire AI governance startup Natoma and a sweeping expansion of its partnership with Amazon Web Services that includes a $6 billion infrastructure commitment.
The dual announcements signal how quickly enterprise AI priorities are shifting from experimentation toward operational deployment, governance, and control.
At the core of both deals is a growing concern of how to safely deploy AI agents capable of taking action across enterprise systems.
“AI has generated enormous excitement, but for enterprises, the real challenge and opportunity is turning intelligence into action,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake. “We are moving into the era of the agentic enterprise, where AI systems don’t just answer questions, but help organizations reason over trusted data, coordinate workflows, and drive real business outcomes.”
Snowflake’s acquisition of Natoma focuses squarely on one of the fastest-emerging infrastructure challenges in enterprise A—governance for AI agents.
As companies move beyond copilots and chatbots toward autonomous agents that can interact with applications, databases, APIs, and workflows, enterprises are increasingly worried about fragmented governance, shadow AI deployments, and data leakage risks.
Natoma’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) infrastructure—a rapidly emerging standard for connecting AI systems to enterprise tools and data sources—will allow Snowflake to create a “natively integrated governance and identity layer” for AI agents and MCP tool access.
Users would securely connect Snowflake AI services including Cortex Agents, Snowflake Intelligence, and Cortex Code to systems spanning SaaS applications, cloud infrastructure, on-prem environments, CRMs, email systems, Jira, Slack, and internal APIs.
“AI agents will only become enterprise-ready if organizations can govern how they operate across systems, applications and tools,” said Pratyus Patnaik, co-founder and CEO of Natoma.
The acquisition reflects a broader shift underway in enterprise AI. Earlier phases of the generative AI boom focused heavily on model performance and access to frontier AI systems. Increasingly, however, enterprise buyers are concentrating on operational concerns such as governance, permissions, auditability, identity management, and integration with existing workflows.
Snowflake cited internal research showing that 96% of organizations still face significant barriers scaling AI across the enterprise.
AWS Partnership Signals Massive AI Infrastructure Demand
Alongside the Natoma acquisition, Snowflake also announced an expanded multi-year strategic collaboration with AWS, including a $6 billion multi-year spend on AWS infrastructure.
The move underscores both the escalating compute demands associated with enterprise AI workloads and Snowflake’s intention to deepen its role as a foundational AI and data platform running on AWS infrastructure.
Snowflake said the expanded collaboration will focus on deeper integrations around generative AI and agentic AI, expanded AWS Marketplace sales initiatives, and joint investments in customer migration and deployment programs.
“Enterprises are rapidly moving from experimenting with AI to putting intelligent agents to work that drive real business outcomes,” said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS.
The partnership also reflects the growing importance of keeping AI systems close to governed enterprise data. Rather than exporting sensitive data into external AI systems, Snowflake and AWS are emphasizing architectures that bring foundation models directly to enterprise datasets within secure cloud environments.
Snowflake said its Cortex AI platform enables customers to run AI workloads such as text-to-SQL, summarization, sentiment analysis, and entity extraction directly inside Snowflake environments. The company is also leveraging AWS Graviton processors and GPU-accelerated Amazon EC2 infrastructure for AI training and inference workloads.
Snowflake said customer adoption through AWS Marketplace has already surpassed $7 billion in lifetime sales, including more than $2 billion in calendar year 2025 sales alone.
Customers cited in the announcement included Fetch and Hex, both of which described using Snowflake on AWS to deploy AI systems on governed enterprise data.