According to CRN, Snowflake announced a new $200 million, multi-year partnership with Anthropic on Wednesday, December 4th, making Anthropic’s Claude AI models natively available to its over 12,600 customers. The company also reported fiscal Q3 2026 revenue of $1.21 billion, a 29% year-over-year increase, with product revenue hitting $1.16 billion. Snowflake’s stock closed at $265.00 but then plunged about 8.5% to $242.39 in after-hours trading following the earnings call. In other news, Snowflake is expanding its partnership with Accenture, which is launching a dedicated business group and training over 5,000 professionals on Snowflake tech. Separately, Snowflake disclosed that its sales through the Amazon Web Services Marketplace have already exceeded $2 billion for the 2025 calendar year, doubling its year-over-year transaction growth.
The AI Bet And The Market Shrug
Here’s the thing: a $200 million commitment to Anthropic is a massive vote of confidence in Claude’s enterprise future. Snowflake isn’t just offering another API connection; they’re baking Claude directly into Snowflake Cortex and their new Snowflake Intelligence agent. The goal is clear: let companies use powerful AI on their most sensitive data without ever having to move it out of Snowflake’s governed environment. That’s a compelling pitch for regulated industries. But the market’s after-hours reaction tells a different story. Beating revenue expectations wasn’t enough. It seems investors are hyper-focused on that slight deceleration in product revenue growth—from 32% last quarter to 29% this quarter. In this “AI at all costs” environment, even strong numbers get punished if they hint at a slowdown. It’s a brutal standard.
What This Means For Everyone Else
For Snowflake customers, this is a big deal. They’re getting what’s arguably the current top-tier reasoning model, Claude Opus, integrated into the data platform they already trust. Building multi-step AI agents that can analyze proprietary financial or healthcare data securely becomes a lot more feasible. For developers, it means less wrestling with infrastructure and more focus on building those actual applications. But let’s not overlook the Accenture expansion. When a global systems integrator giant commits to training thousands of its people on your stack, that’s a huge channel accelerator. It means enterprises wanting to adopt Snowflake’s AI tools will have a deep bench of consultants ready to help—for a price, of course. This is how platforms get entrenched in the Fortune 500.
The AWS Marketplace Hustle
Now, that $2 billion AWS Marketplace figure is quietly one of the most impressive stats in the whole announcement. Doubling year-over-year growth on that scale? That shows how much enterprises prefer to buy through their existing cloud procurement channels. It removes friction, as AWS’s VP said. For Snowflake, it’s a brilliant workaround. They compete fiercely with the hyperscalers’ own data services, but by being a top-tier marketplace partner, they tap directly into AWS’s massive customer base and billing system. It’s a pragmatic, “if you can’t beat ’em, join their marketplace” strategy that’s clearly paying off in billions. Basically, it ensures they’re wherever the customer wants to buy.
The Big Picture Tightrope
So, what’s the real takeaway? Snowflake is executing a complex balancing act. They’re partnering with an AI leader (Anthropic), leveraging a consulting giant (Accenture), and co-opting a competitor’s sales channel (AWS). All while trying to convince Wall Street that their core data business can still grow robustly as it matures. The Anthropic deal is a forward-looking investment to make their platform indispensable for the AI era. But the stock drop is a stark reminder that in tech, you’re often judged on your last quarter’s growth rate, not your next decade’s strategy. They’ve got the pieces in place, but the pressure to keep those product revenue percentages up is only going to intensify.
