Snowflake Inc. is teaming up with Palantir Technologies Inc. to help joint customers build artificial intelligence applications faster.

The collaboration, which was announced today, builds on a years-long partnership between the companies. They previously introduced a connector that enables customers to move data between their respective platforms.

The companies’ new collaboration focuses on two Palantir products called Foundry and AIP. Snowflake is integrating the offerings with its namesake cloud data platform, which enterprises use to store and analyze their business records. The integration is designed to help customers more efficiently manage the data they use to power their AI workloads. 

Foundry, the first Palantir product involved in the initiative, is a data management platform. It can collect records from a large number of systems and organize them in a standard format. From there, customers can visualize the data in graphs. Foundry also provides the ability to make information available to custom applications and run analyses using AI models.

Companies that require more advanced AI features can use Foundry with AIP, the second Palantir product for which Snowflake has rolled out an integration. AIP can be used to automate business tasks with language models. It provides tools that ease development tasks such as finding the best neural network for a given automation initiative.

Until now, joint Snowflake and Palantir customers had to copy their data between the companies’ platforms. The integration introduced today removes that requirement. It thereby avoids the manual work and bandwidth costs associated with moving large volumes of data over the network.

The integration makes use of Apache Iceberg, a data tablet format optimized for large information repositories. Snowflake’s platform doesn’t store Iceberg files directly. Instead, it accesses them from an external cloud storage environment managed by the customer. That arrangement removes the need to create a fresh copy of a company’s Iceberg dataset and load it into Snowflake, which in turn reduces data duplication.

“This partnership enables secure, high-volume data sharing and communication between systems without forcing customers to replicate or move their most sensitive data,” Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake’s vice president of product, wrote in a blog post today.

According to the company, streamlining the way data is shared inside an organization also makes it easier for AI agents to use that data. “Agents need to be able to react immediately to the most up-to-date data for better decision-making,” Kleinerman wrote. “Reducing data friction between Foundry and a customer’s Snowflake data avoids the data silos, duplication and latency that can all hamper agentic AI.”

Snowflake has significantly expanded its platform’s AI capabilities since the start of the year. Earlier this month, it introduced a set of AI features geared toward the financial services industry. In June, the company debuted a tool called Snowflake Intelligence that enables customers to query their data using natural language prompts.

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