Gregory Bent
CFA, Equity Analyst, US & Canadian Markets, 30+ Years of Experience
Snowflake's blowout quarter shows enterprise consumption accelerating structurally, putting it back atop cloud infrastructure. Product revenue rose 36.5% to $1.49 billion, 5.1% above guidance, clearing the 36% bar and showing first-quarter acceleration was no one-off. Non-GAAP operating margin hit 15.5% versus 12.5% guided and adjusted EPS was $0.62 versus $0.45, so Cortex Code and AI workloads are scaling at high margins. The bull case needs product revenue growth near 40% by Q4. x.com x.comÂ
Snowflake doesn't deserve to be caught in the SaaS selloff because AI is accelerating its business rather than disrupting it. CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy says Cortex Code, its data coding agent launched nine weeks ago, is already used by 50% of customers, making it the fastest-adopted product Snowflake has launched. Early adopters increased their Snowflake consumption by 11% on average. x.comÂ
Snowflake keeps losing market share, and not just to Databricks. In hiring-demand mentions, Microsoft Fabric jumped 165% and Databricks grew 40% year over year, while Snowflake and Google BigQuery rose the least at 15%. x.comÂ
Snowflake combines accelerating growth with margin expansion, which justifies a valuation that is not cheap. EPS beat as total revenue rose 35% and product revenue rose 37%, a third straight quarter of acceleration. Remaining performance obligations grew 30%, net revenue retention was 126%, and guidance rose for product revenue, gross margin and operating margin. x.comÂ
Snowflake is evolving from a cloud data warehouse into the default data and AI control plane for large enterprises, an inflection the market misses by treating it as a maturing former hypergrowth name. The shift shows in customer commitments, workload expansion and platform centrality, supporting a credible path to $500. @buccocapital notes a customer rebuilt Gainsight on Snowflake in five hours, suggesting it may be the assailant in the SaaSpocalypse rather than a victim. x.com x.comÂ
Snowflake's valuation looks full after more than doubling since May on an AI inflection story, given five years of promised inflections that didn't materialize. Stock-based compensation remains heavy at $1.6B against FY2026 revenue of $4.7B, though dilution has been kept in check lately. At about 23x EV/revenue, or 19x forward, it sits near the top of its 2-3 year range. A Databricks IPO could make investors see Snowflake as old relic tech. x.com x.comÂ
Snowflake is overlooked AI infrastructure because every enterprise AI model needs clean, governed data to run on. It has 126% net revenue retention, $9.77 billion of contracted future revenue and 813 of the world's 2,000 largest companies as customers. x.comÂ
Snowflake's revenue growth has far outpaced its stock return, leaving a valuation disconnect. Revenue rose 363% over five years to $1.55 billion quarterly while the shares gained just 19%; that disparity looks hard to justify. x.comÂ
Snowflake's upside is limited even in a dream scenario. If it grows 35% a year for seven years and EBITDA margins expand from 16% to 43%, ignoring stock compensation, it reaches $43 billion of revenue and $18.5 billion of EBITDA. Once growth slows to about 10%, that is roughly where Salesforce is today, so all that winning yields only about 2x the current enterprise value. x.comÂ
Snowflake is the AI data cloud that enterprises use as a secure, governed foundation to run AI agents and generative AI at scale on their existing data. It has strong ties to OpenAI, through a $200 million multi-year deal, plus Microsoft, Anthropic, AWS, Google Cloud, Accenture, SAP and Palantir. The chart shows a pivot flip ahead of earnings on May 27. x.comÂ