Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

January 2025

Announcing DeepSeek-R1 in Preview on Snowflake Cortex AI

We are excited to bring DeepSeek-R1 to Snowflake Cortex AI! As described by DeepSeek, this model, trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT), can achieve performance comparable to OpenAI-o1 across math, code and reasoning tasks. Based on DeepSeek’s posted benchmarking, DeepSeek-R1 tops the leaderboard among open source models and rivals the most advanced closed source models globally.

Snowflake Accelerates Self-Serve Data Warehouse Migrations with Free SnowConvert for All

Migrating from a traditional data warehouse to a cloud data platform is often complex, resource-intensive and costly. At Snowflake, we believe every organization should benefit from an easy, enterprise-grade and collaborative cloud AI and data platform — and should be able to make that transition as fast and automatic as possible.

Snowflake Projection And Aggregation Policies: Enhance Data Security And Collaboration

In this video, we dive into Projection and Aggregation Policies in Snowflake, two powerful features that help you manage and secure sensitive data while unlocking new use cases. What are Projection and Aggregation Policies? Projection Policies define whether a column can be included in the output of a SQL query. Aggregation Policies enforce that queries against aggregation-constrained tables must group data into minimum-sized chunks to prevent the return of individual records, helping protect privacy.

The AI Tipping Point: What Public Sector Leaders Need to Know for 2025

AI is proving that it’s here to stay. While 2023 brought wonder and 2024 saw widespread experimentation, 2025 will be the year that the public sector gets serious about AI's applications. But it’s complicated: AI proofs of concept are graduating from the sandbox to production, just as some of AI’s biggest cheerleaders are turning a bit dour.

Advanced, Built-In Data Governance and Data Discovery with Snowflake Horizon Catalog

With the advent of generative AI and large language models (LLMs), enterprises are racing to unlock as much business value as possible from their data assets, including apps and models. Unfortunately, these data assets are often locked away in silos across multiple cloud service providers and solutions, as well as across different partner, customer and vendor ecosystems.

The Marketing Agency of the Future: Powered by Unified Data, Trust and AI

We are entering a new era for marketing and advertising agencies. From evolving consumer expectations and increasingly stringent privacy regulations to the rise of AI, the landscape is shifting rapidly. To remain competitive, agencies need to reimagine how they operate. The winners will be those that adopt forward-thinking data strategies, build trust with partners and clients, and leverage AI to deliver real-time insights and personalized campaigns.

The AI Tipping Point: What Telecommunications Leaders Need to Know for 2025

AI is proving that it’s here to stay. While 2023 brought wonder, and 2024 saw widespread experimentation, 2025 will be the year that telecommunications enterprises get serious about AI's applications. But it’s complicated: AI proofs of concept are graduating from the sandbox to production, just as some of AI’s biggest cheerleaders are turning a bit dour.

Shared Destiny with Snowflake Horizon Catalog Built-In Security

Security has been an integral capability of Snowflake since the company was founded. Through the customer-configurable security capabilities of the Snowflake Horizon Catalog, we empower security admins and chief information security officers (CISOs) to better protect their environments and centralize threat monitoring and role-based access controls across clouds.

Unlocking Geospatial Data in Snowflake: Store, Analyze, And Visualize At Scale

Snowflake provides for seamless handling of geospatial data, making it easier to work with location-based information directly in your data platform. In this video, we explore Snowflake’s native support for geospatial data, which allows you to store, process, and analyze spatial information at scale. Geospatial data is important because everything happens somewhere. By breaking down silos and combining spatial and non-spatial data, Snowflake empowers you to uncover valuable insights across a wide range of use cases —from mapping to location analytics to geospatial trends.

Demo | Snowflake Data Clean Rooms

Snowflake Data Clean Rooms empower organizations to collaborate on data in a privacy-conscious way directly within Snowflake. With an intuitive interface and a focus on simplifying secure data sharing, Snowflake Data Clean Rooms enables businesses to build and use clean rooms seamlessly, leveraging Snowflake’s powerful data platform. This solution eliminates unnecessary complexity and additional access fees, ensuring organizations can focus on deriving insights while maintaining data privacy. Learn more about how Snowflake Data Clean Rooms support privacy-preserving collaboration in this blog.

SwiftKV from Snowflake AI Research Reduces Inference Costs of Meta Llama LLMs up to 75% on Cortex AI

Large language models (LLMs) are at the heart of generative AI transformations, driving solutions across industries — from efficient customer support to simplified data analysis. Enterprises need performant, cost-effective and low-latency inference to scale their gen AI solutions. Yet, the complexity and computational demands of LLM inference present a challenge. Inference costs remain prohibitive for many workloads. That’s where SwiftKV and Snowflake Cortex AI come in.

The AI Tipping Point: What Manufacturing Leaders Need to Know for 2025

AI is proving that it’s here to stay. While 2023 brought wonder, and 2024 saw widespread experimentation, 2025 will be the year that manufacturing enterprises get serious about AI's applications. But it’s complicated: AI proofs of concept are graduating from the sandbox to production, just as some of AI’s biggest cheerleaders are turning a bit dour.

The Advanced Guide to Unlocking Geospatial Insights in Snowflake

Over the last three geospatial-centric blog posts, we’ve covered the basics of what geospatial data is, how it works in the broader world of data and how it specifically works in Snowflake based on our native support for GEOGRAPHY, GEOMETRY and H3. Those articles are great for dipping your toe in, getting a feel for the water and maybe even wading into the shallow end of the pool. But there is so much more you can do with geospatial data in your Snowflake account!

Introducing One Million Minds + One Platform

AI and technology are reshaping the world we live and work in every day. It’s imperative that we equip people with the tools and skills they need to succeed in this rapidly changing landscape. In this video, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy announces a new company initiative to tackle the challenge. Called "One Million Minds + One Platform," its goal is to train and certify one million students and professionals in data and AI by 2029 and 100,000 users on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud by 2027.

Securing Snowflake With Network And Authentication Policies: Protect Your Account

In this video, we explore Network and Authentication Policies in Snowflake. These are account-level rules that control who can successfully connect to your Snowflake environment. Network Policies define allowed sources, determining which IP ranges can access your Snowflake account. Authentication Policies control access by enforcing Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication and other rules for secure logins.

Snow Report: What's Happening At Snowflake In January

This month's edition of Snow Report provides details on upcoming must-attend events, such as AI & Data Predictions 2025, Startup Demo Day, and Gen AI Day. The newsletter also contains some important product announcements, a list of recommended resources, and details about the launch of this year's Startup Challenge.

Build RAG and Agent-based AI Apps with Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet in Snowflake Cortex AI

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Claude 3.5 Sonnet as the first Anthropic foundation model available in Snowflake Cortex AI. Customers can now access the most intelligent model in the Claude model family from Anthropic using familiar SQL, Python and REST API interfaces, within the Snowflake security perimeter.

Predictions 2025: AI as Cybersecurity Tool and Target

Though AI is (still) the hottest technology topic, it’s not the overriding issue for enterprise security in 2025. Advanced AI will open up new attack vectors and also deliver new tools for protecting an organization’s data. But the underlying challenge is the sheer quantity of data that overworked cybersecurity teams face as they try to answer basic questions such as, “Are we under attack?”

Composable CDPs in Financial Services: Empowering Marketers and Reducing Compliance Risk

Marketers at financial services companies have their work cut out for them. Their companies have a wealth of data, but that data is often fragmented among different systems and divisions, and protected-class data has a wide range of restrictions on how it can be used for different product lines.

Snowflake Brings Its "End Data Disparity" Initiative To Switzerland For The World Economic Forum

Snowflake is heading to Davos, Switzerland in January to the World Economic Forum 2025, carrying with it its message about the End Data Disparity initiative and its knowledge of how AI is revolutionizing all that can be accomplished with data. Stay tuned for "Data Cloud Now's" upcoming coverage of the event and its conversations with industry leaders. The Forum runs from January 20 to 24.