Head of Insights @ CB Insights | Former Professional 🚴♂️
Databricks vs Snowflake As Snowflake’s market cap approaches Databricks $100B valuation, new business relationships drive the battle for AI and data leadership… New business relationships reveal the extent of the data platform wars: Snowflake and Databricks are locked in a drag race to win AI company relationships. A fifth of the hottest AI companies – including every major foundation model provider, infrastructure giants, and critical data tooling – are partnering with BOTH platforms. So, where are the strategic splits happening? Snowflake has fortified the enterprise data cloud with governance and accessibility partners that traditional buyers demand. Plus, AI data activation partners help turn Snowflake into a mission-critical customer engagement engine. Databricks is redefining enterprise data infrastructure for the AI era. Their recent key business relationships double down on the ML/AI stack and highlight technical depth and specialized AI tooling. Both claim to be the unified platform for all workloads. Databricks wins technical buyers who need flexibility for custom AI applications. Snowflake wins SQL simplicity and zero-maintenance operations. Locked in fierce head-to-head, where is each placing bets for the next wave of growth? Hiring insights reveal strategic direction for 2026: 🔴 Databricks is building production AI for the most demanding environments. They're hiring for an enterprise and regulated industry focus, aiming squarely at Snowflake’s current leadership. Watch for major government/defense contract wins in Q1-Q2 2026 and deepening vertical capture in FSI and healthcare, where AI compliance matters most. 🔵 Snowflake is building the distribution machine and playing catch-up in AI/ML arenas where Databricks took an early lead. They're professionalizing services to make switching easier and weaponizing the 10,618-customer installed base through partner leverage. Expect aggressive bundling with SaaS leaders (Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, etc.) and hyperscaler marketplaces. The competition is accelerating with Databricks hiring for deep technical AI deployments with customers and Snowflake hiring for ecosystem leverage and services-led growth. Both strategies can win – but highlight different 2026 playbooks. The business relationship and hiring battles we're seeing today? Just table-setting for the distribution and technical wars ahead. P.S. Want more data and insights on what’s next in the Snowflake vs Databricks battle? Comment “platform wars” below for *free* access to CB Insights predictive intelligence.
Jason Saltzman Databricks is a lakehouse platform built for data engineering, ML, and AI workloads with native support for unstructured data and real-time processing, while Snowflake is a cloud data warehouse optimized for SQL analytics and structured data with compute-storage separation. Lakehouse v Data warehouse..... should have been the preface to your post. The rest is just healthy competition to deliver choices to enterprise customers. Cheers!
I am just here for the 🍿.
Meh, the bundle is the beginning of the end. We can’t bother to innovate or create real value, let’s bundle to give the illusion of better value! 🙄 Snowflake peaked, change my mind.
Where does ClickHouse fall into this to cannibalize both?
Platform wars
"Platform Wars"
“Platform wars”
Man just use ducklake or motherduck stop using your laptops as a mainframe terminal of 1980 we don’t need to lock our data behind these next gen IBM and Oracle data systems.
Platform wars
Strategy and Analytics | Turn data into decisions that deliver | Author of “Decide What Matters” | haroldleusink.com
1wThe real race isn’t Snowflake vs Databricks. Advantage comes from why you collect data, not where. Define the decisions first; choose tech that makes those calls faster and repeatable.