Snowflake announced at its annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2025, the next evolution of compute innovations that deliver faster performance, enhanced usability, and stronger price-performance value - raising the bar for modern data infrastructure. This includes Standard Warehouse - Generation 2 (Gen2) (now generally available), an enhanced version of Snowflake's virtual Standard Warehouse with next-generation hardware and additional enhancements to deliver 2.1x faster analytics performance and 1.9x faster analytics performance than Managed Spark. In addition, Snowflake introduced Snowflake Adaptive Compute (now in private preview), a new compute service that lowers the burden of resource management by maximizing efficiency through automatic resource sizing and sharing. Warehouses created using Adaptive Compute, known as Adaptive Warehouses, accelerate performance for users without driving up costs, ultimately redefining data management in the era of AI.

"We're reimagining what customers can expect from a modern data platform, delivering faster performance, easier scalability, and greater value for every dollar spent," said Artin Avanes, Head of Core Data Platform, Snowflake. "Snowflake's Gen2 more than doubles the speed of core analytics workloads, helping teams make quicker, data-driven decisions. Coupled with Adaptive Warehouses, we're enabling customers with an easier, more efficient approach to platform management where resource decisions are automated and right-sized. This isn't just about infrastructure improvements, it's about preparing your business to innovate quickly in the fast-moving AI era."

"As one of the world's premier biopharmaceutical companies, efficiency and scalability are critical to everything we do as we race to deliver medical innovations. Snowflake's easy, connected, and trusted platform has been instrumental in streamlining our operations so that we can maximize the value of our data, and the impact we drive for end users," said Steve Ring, Director of Enterprise Database Solutions, Pfizer. "We're excited about the potential of Adaptive Warehouses to build on that success. What we're seeing with Adaptive Warehouses is just the beginning of a larger trend in cloud computing - the ability to dynamically adjust resources based on workload demands, without human intervention."

Snowflake Gen2 Provides 2.1x Faster Analytics Performance

As data volumes grow and workloads multiply, traditional compute can't keep up - slowing down queries, creating bottlenecks, and dragging down productivity. Gen2 warehouses are designed for faster performance on today's data demands, where organizations are running more complex, end-to-end analytics across rapidly scaling workloads. Powered by upgraded hardware and enhanced software, these innovations deliver lightning-fast analytics and industry-leading performance. Thousands of global customers can now leverage this updated version of Snowflake's current standard virtual warehouse in order to future-proof organizations for a fast-moving AI world.

Snowflake Adaptive Compute Powers Business Innovation with Better Efficiency

In today's AI-powered landscape, organizations must continuously find new ways to accelerate time to value across all of their data in order to stay ahead. For decades, enterprises have grappled with operational drag at every layer of the stack - from time-intensive cluster management and disruptive upgrades to manual performance tuning and laborious optimizations.

Adaptive Compute marks a major step towards eliminating the operational complexity that often hinders businesses. By automatically scaling resources and intelligently routing queries behind the scenes, Adaptive Warehouses simplify warehouse management for customers - freeing up teams so they can focus on innovation instead of the infrastructure behind it. This ensures infrastructure becomes so seamless, it's virtually invisible to users. With Adaptive Warehouses powered by this compute service, teams no longer need to manually manage warehouse sizes, concurrency settings, or multi-cluster configurations. Moreover, Adaptive Warehouses are designed to incorporate the latest hardware and performance enhancements, while also optimizing resource sharing within an account, maximizing efficiency for superior price-performance.

Snowflake Unveils More Platform Innovations to Strengthen Trust, Reliability, and Data Accessibility

In addition to delivering faster performance, enhanced usability, and stronger price-performance through new compute innovations, Snowflake is also introducing capabilities designed to enhance trust, reliability, and data accessibility including:

• Interoperability Across Catalogs and Engines: With new Catalog-Linked Databases (generally available soon), customers can automatically sync Snowflake Horizon Catalog with Apache Iceberg objects managed by any Iceberg REST Catalog - including Apache Polaris, Snowflake's managed service for Apache Polaris (Snowflake Open Catalog), and AWS Glue - to easily apply advanced governance and discovery capabilities.
• Expanding Data Discovery with Universal Search: Customers can discover data in external relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and other external sources using External Data in Universal Search (private preview soon), all without leaving Snowflake. This allows users to find data from virtually anywhere, and extend visibility throughout the entire data ecosystem.
• Enhancing Security & Compliance with AI-Driven Data Governance: With the new Copilot for Horizon Catalog (private preview soon), customers can easily get answers to governance and security questions through a Snowflake Cortex AI-powered chat interface without any SQL expertise required. This makes data oversight more intuitive and accessible, while strengthening security and compliance through faster, more informed decision-making.
• Safeguarding Businesses with Reliable Data Recovery: To empower customers with enhanced regulatory compliance and cyber resilience against ransomware, Snowflake is now offering point-in-time, immutable backups with Snapshots (public preview soon). Snapshots ensure that data isn't altered or deleted once created for reliable data recovery when it matters most.
• Customizing Security To Users' Needs: Customers can now build and enable partner solutions for security scanners tailored to their unique requirements with Extensions to Snowflake's Trust Center (generally available soon). This gives companies more flexibility to meet industry-specific compliance standards with solutions that adapt to their environment.
• Accelerating Issue Resolution & Optimizing Data Performance: Snowflake customers can resolve issues faster, optimize performance, and boost developer productivity with real-time insights and unified diagnostics through new AI Observability Tools (now generally available) - delivering greater visibility and control across their data environment.