By Adam Levine and Kit Norton

Shares of Snowflake soared after the data warehousing company's fiscal first-quarter profit handily surpassed Wall Street's expectations. The company separately announced it has expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services, committing $6 billion for artificial intelligence infrastructure over five years.

Snowflake stock surged 35% to $235.75 in premarket trading Thursday. The stock is down 20% this year while the S&P 500 index is up 10%.

However, shares have recently bounced, rising 45% from the bottom on April 10, as the company makes the case that data warehousing could be immune from the disruption that AI will bring to the software industry.

The company's fiscal first-quarter earnings results appear to be helping its case.

For the quarter that ended on April 30, Snowflake posted adjusted earnings of 39 cents a share, compared with 24 cents a year ago, with revenue growing 33% to $1.39 billion. Wall Street had expected adjusted earnings of 32 cents a share on sales of $1.3 billion.

In unadjusted accounting, Snowflake operates at a loss and reported a loss of 86 cents a share in the fiscal first quarter.

Looking ahead, Snowflake forecasts second-quarter product revenue coming in between $1.415 billion and $1.42 billion, well above the analyst consensus expectation of $1.37 billion.

For the full-fiscal year, the AI data cloud company expects product revenue totaling $5.84 billion, up from its previous $5.66 billion view and above Wall Street's $5.67 billion view. Snowflake said it decided to raise its full-year guidance due to "strong momentum" in its core platform and AI businesses.

"AI continues to accelerate our core data platform business as customers move to Snowflake with increasing urgency," CFO Brian Robins said in the earnings release.

Even more than the earnings results, investors could be pushing the stock higher on the AWS announcement.

As part of the expanded collaboration, Snowflake is making a $6 billion multi-year infrastructure commitment to Amazon.com-owned AWS. Snowflake said the $6 billion commitment reflects the "accelerating enterprise demand for AI and data workloads running on AWS."

"With AWS, we are making it easier for enterprises to bring AI directly to governed data, so they can move faster, operate with greater clarity, and create measurable impact at scale," Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said in the press release.

Snowflake's earnings, and the investor response, come as the software sector has been hit hard by the AI wave over the past year.

Many investors have become convinced that AI agents will reshape the business. Agents are software that can use an AI model to complete a complex series of tasks from a simple conversational prompt.

In the first place, software customers could use coding agents to build custom versions of software they now purchase, usually via subscriptions based on users. In its earnings call earlier this month, Palantir Technologies said that it had done just that with its customer-relations-management software.

If agents begin to outnumber people on corporate networks, as many analysts are predicting, that would be a direct shot at the per-user fee structure at many software companies, replacing it with a consumption-based charge.

However, Snowflake already has a consumption revenue model, even if its gross margin is lower than that of companies with sales based on users.

Data warehousing takes all of a customer's cloud data that come from many different sources in varied formats, and puts them together into a cleaned, governed source for enterprise data analysis and forecasting.

Snowflake has been making the case that not only will its services not be devalued by AI, but they could become essential, as could similar offerings from Alphabet, Amazon.com, Microsoft, and start-up Databricks.

Like human users, agents are going to require access to cleaned and properly governed data. Agents can chew through data analysis much faster than humans can, and this could raise consumption as workloads shift from people to machines.

Snowflake is also offering its own AI software, including agents. These initiatives are just getting off the ground, and they're beginning to get a little traction.

Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com and Kit Norton at kit.norton@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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May 28, 2026 04:34 ET (08:34 GMT)

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