By Maggie Holland

 “What a time to be alive for this business.” This was one of the early statements uttered by Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman on day one of the company’s Las Vegas summit, as he took to the stage to usher in a new expanded – and AI-focused – partnership with NVIDIA.

“We’re going to push the boundaries of what you can ask of data,” Slootman added.

Not only will those boundaries be pushed, they will also be lowered. That’s because the two companies have come together to lay down an accelerated path that enables organizations of any size to quickly and easily build custom-built generative AI apps using their own data but do so from within the secure foundations of Snowflake’s Data Cloud.

“We’re going to bring the world’s best compute engine to the world’s most valuable data,” said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s founder and CEO.

“Data gravity is real, so it’s a lot easier to bring our compute engine to Snowflake.  [It’s about] data plus AI algorithms plus compute engine. Our collaboration, our partnership brings all those things together.”

NVIDIA”s NeMo platform is adept at creating large language models (LLMs) and, added together with the firm’s GPU-accelerated compute power and Snowflake’s capabilities in governance and security, enterprises will be able to achieve things in days and weeks vs months or more, both companies were keen to stress.

Thanks to the expanded partnership, companies will soon be able to ask hard and fast questions of their data and garner meaningful intelligence to drive decisions, the companies claim.

“We’re going to turbo charge the living daylights out of Snowflake. And you’ll be able to do more and do more with less,” Huang said.

“Imagine if you had hundreds of your customer support agents sitting in front of you and you just ask them a whole bunch of questions. That’s the future. You’re going to put a large language model in front of that customer service database and you’re going to talk to it… You can ask those questions in a normal human language and it will come back to you. That’s the miracle and that’s an incredible opportunity.”

Snowflake customers are sitting on goldmines of data, according to Huang, who promised assembled attendees: “Frank and I are going to help you turn your data into intelligence.”

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Snowflake works with many partners but – as Slootman alluded to – finding ones it feels able to take to such a deep level of engagement is not always easy.

“For a lot of the things that we do there are a lot of people trying to kill us. Finding partners that align with us [is something that] doesn’t come along everyday,” he said.

“I don’t want to say it’s a match made in heaven, but it’s as close as you can get. We’re in full alignment there’s no conflict.”

Huang responded: “We’re lovers not fighters.”