Shares of Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW | SNOW Price Prediction) have been melting up in recent months, thanks in part to an outstanding quarterly showing and a few big sell-side analyst upgrades. With $500.00 per share on the Wall Street-high now on the table, a renewed focus on the company’s re-accelerating growth, and the potential for agents to take that re-acceleration into overdrive, questions linger as to whether or not Snowflake’s latest melt-up will help fuel a breakout moment to new highs, one that’s been many years in the making.
Snowflake’s agentic tailwinds are kicking in
In numerous prior pieces, I highlighted the agentic tailwind, and while it’s still early days for the opportunity in AI agents, as enterprises steadily adopt the technology to supercharge operating economics and ROIs, I do think that the latest wave of analyst re-ratings might just be the start, as investors start to change how they think about the data warehousing company, which has since tripled down on the AI cloud.
With every acquisition that Snowflake makes (one of its most recent being the observability platform Observe), it feels like the firm is becoming more of an agentic platform for the enterprise to build off of. Indeed, given that Snowflake is where the data is, it makes more sense for firms to gravitate towards Snowflake.
As it turns out, data gravity is just one of the perks of operating in the data layer and expanding from there. In any case, as we reach an agentic inflection point of sorts, it’s not hard to imagine that consumption is just going to keep marching higher at a rate that may still be difficult for investors to fathom.
It’s time to move beyond AI models and the frontier labs
As AI becomes increasingly commoditized, with the rise of cheaper open-weight models that may very well give pricier frontier models a good run for their money, it’s becoming more apparent that the real moat in the AI-driven enterprise might lie more with the ontology or the data context layer. Perhaps which AI model you choose to use isn’t nearly as important as the environment where it’s allowed to operate.
And, in this regard, I do think that Snowflake stands out as a firm that’s building an ecosystem that’s able to beckon customers with its incredible tools and tech, rather than “lock in.” At the end of the day, Snowflake is all about keeping things open. Whether we’re talking about embracing Apache Iceberg, going heavy on enabling customers to fine-tune their open-weight models, or starting off as a cloud-agnostic platform, openness really is ingrained in the company’s DNA.
And with open-weight models starting to hog headlines in recent weeks, I do think that it’s time to give Snowflake a closer look now that it’s starting to gain serious momentum.
At the end of the day, Snowflake doesn’t need to find ways to lock in customers; they just need to keep offering innovative products (think the CoCo and CoWork agents), which, I believe, will keep the growth re-acceleration going as we reach some kind of agent-driven inference inflection point where ontology and data gravity become the new big moats of the AI world as the enterprise looks to put the ROI-driving potential of AI to the test within their own closed doors.
Could a consumption boom be ahead as agentic usage surges?
Over the next year, the big question is where growth goes from here, given how quickly consumption bills can add up for customers as they uncover value with Snowflake’s latest and greatest tools.
Indeed, much buzz has been made about the explosive growth spurt in Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR), a strategic Snowflake partner, which, I think, bodes very well for the next-generation AI-enabling software plays as the AI revolution moves ahead with a bit more of a focus on opening things up and shifting gears from experimentation to something far more profound.
So, while a $500.00 price target from Wells Fargo’s Ryan MacWilliams seems high, I do think that he’s spot-on to highlight the agentic impact on consumption and growth, as well as the potential behind Cortex, Snowpark, and other magnificent products.
After doubling in three months or soaring 172% since the April lows, I do think it’s about time for more analysts to revisit the drawing board as CoCo, CoWork, and the whole Snowflake ecosystem start to really drive enterprise value, and with that, more usage.
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