Snowflake Is Rising After Its Investor Day. Why UBS Upgraded the Stock. -- Barrons.com

Dow Jones
04 Jun

By Nate Wolf

Snowflake scored a series of price target bumps and a key upgrade after its investor day in San Francisco, sending its stock higher.

Snowflake, which reported its first-ever $1 billion revenue quarter last month, came into Tuesday's event with plenty of goodwill on Wall Street. Of the 50 analysts surveyed by FactSet, 40 have Buy ratings. And the cloud-based data storage company emerged with another key endorsement, as Karl Keirstead and Jack Fyda of UBS upgraded the stock to Buy and lifted their price target to $265 from $210 in a research note. The "Snowflake Summit" conference concludes Thursday.

Snowflake shares rose 1.4% to $212.11 Wednesday -- another day in the black for a stock that has soared 56% over the last 12 months as of Tuesday's close. The S&P 500 was up 0.1%.

That bull run could continue as corporate customers boost spending on data software, Keirstead and Fyda say. "We're late, we get it," the pair wrote. "But, if this data investment cycle has duration, as we think it does, then it isn't too late."

Snowflake is positioned to benefit from the continued artificial intelligence boom, which has spurred demand for data migration and modernization efforts, the UBS analysts said.

"Over the past 6 months, we've been struck by the uptick in tone from enterprises suggesting a need to 'get their data in order' ahead of GenAI initiatives," they wrote, adding that these investments are likely in their early stages.

AI is clearly a focus for Snowflake management. Among the new products the company unveiled this week are Snowconvert AI, which helps automate data migration onto Snowflake's platform, and Snowflake Intelligence, an AI agent that draws insights from companies' existing data for non-technical users.

Competitors will, of course, try to claim a slice of this demand for themselves. In particular, cloud storage rival Databricks -- perhaps Snowflake's greatest threat -- hosts its own summit next week. But there appears to be room in the market for both players, analysts at Raymond James wrote in a note Tuesday.

"Although the rivalry with Databricks continues, we see the environment as one of a rising tide lifting both boats," the analysts said. Raymond James maintained an Outperform rating for Snowflake stock.

Several others on Wall Street came away from the San Francisco festivities pleased with Snowflake's outlook. In total, 13 analysts boosted their price targets on Tuesday, according to FactSet.

Not everyone was so sanguine about the stock, however. In a research note Wednesday, analysts at Guggenheim Securities said they were confident in Snowflake's core data warehousing and analytics business, but had questions about the company's AI monetization efforts.

"We continue to view SNOW as a well-run leading Cloud Data Warehouse vendor," the Guggenheim team wrote. "Whether SNOW becomes more than that still remains up for debate."

Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@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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June 04, 2025 10:22 ET (14:22 GMT)

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