Snowflake's Performance Surpasses Expectations, Secures $6 Billion AWS Deal, and Soars Over 30% in After-Hours Trading

Snowflake has submitted a first-quarter report card that far exceeded market expectations, and simultaneously announced a commitment of $6 billion to AWS over the next five years. The double boon has driven the stock price to surge by more than 30% after hours.

This procurement agreement covers Amazon's own Graviton general-purpose chips and AI GPUs, marking another significant leap in the scale of Snowflake's cooperation with AWS. When Snowflake went public in 2020, it disclosed a five-year contract value of $1.2 billion, which expanded to $2.5 billion in 2023, and now it has directly risen to $6 billion, with an annual expenditure of about $1.2 billion. It is worth noting that, unlike Amazon's previous agreements with Anthropic and OpenAI, this transaction does not involve equity investment.

For AWS, this is another heavyweight customer order following Anthropic's commitment of over a trillion dollars over ten years, further solidifying its competitive position in the cloud infrastructure market.

Performance and guidance both exceed expectations

For the fiscal first quarter of the 2026 fiscal year, which ended on April 30, Snowflake achieved revenue of $1.39 billion, a year-over-year increase of 33%, with an adjusted EPS of 39 cents. According to data aggregated by LSEG, analysts previously expected revenue of $1.32 billion and EPS of 32 cents; both core indicators significantly exceeded expectations.

The second-quarter guidance is equally impressive. The company estimates product revenue to be between $1.415 billion and $1.42 billion, with an adjusted operating margin rate of 12.5%, both above the market expectations of $1.37 billion and 11.9%, respectively.

The company also announced the acquisition of AI start-up Natoma, with the specific amount undisclosed, with the intention of further strengthening its AI capabilities. Snowflake, which went public in 2020, currently has a market value of just over $60 billion.

Graviton demand heats up, CPU faces a structural opportunity

One highlight of this agreement is Snowflake's increased procurement of Graviton chips. AWS launched this Arm-based self-developed chip in 2018, which remains its most successful chip product to date. As early as 2022, Snowflake began evaluating the use of Graviton, and the new agreement will further deepen the cooperation between the two parties at the chip level.

From the industry trend perspective, AI applications are transitioning from question-and-answer chatbots to task-oriented intelligent agents. These applications require the coordination and movement of large amounts of data between multiple agents, putting forward higher demands on general computing capabilities, thereby highlighting the strategic value of CPU chips.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on a财报 call in April this year that Graviton allows Meta to run CPU-intensive workloads behind intelligent agent AIs with the required performance and efficiency. Meta has previously announced the use of hundreds of thousands of Graviton chips. Google and Microsoft subsequently launched their own Arm-based chips, with Arm accelerating its penetration into the data center market traditionally dominated by x86 architecture.