Oracle now prices and bills Snowflake on OCI, and owns the discount
Snowflake gets Oracle's channel and cloud credits; Oracle gets the customer, the contract and the discount on a service that competes with its own database. The case both sides cite is an egress saving for customers they already share.
Vincent Jiang · 2 min read
Oracle+0.22% — Oracle, up 0.22 percent today and Snowflake+1.04% — Snowflake, up 1.04 percent today announced on October 27, at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas, that the Snowflake AI Data Cloud will run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a native, first-party service: Oracle handles pricing, discounts and the invoice, and customers can pay with Oracle Universal Credits, the cloud commitments they have already made 1. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy called OCI the flagship AI data platform partner 14.
The discount now belongs to Oracle
Snowflake gets a channel funded by money customers already committed to Oracle; Oracle, which sells Oracle AI Database and Autonomous AI Database alongside it, gets to price the competitor and own the customer relationship on that channel 13. Neither company has confirmed a general-availability date, so the terms can still move 3.
The headline benefit is a cost line, not new work
The case both sides cite is egress. Ashish Chaturvedi, executive research leader at analyst firm HFS Research, said the clearest, most immediate benefit is eliminating cross-cloud data-transfer charges for large Oracle application customers that already use Snowflake, those moving ERP and finance data across clouds nightly. NetSuite customers with little engineering capacity gain the integration work they could rarely staff 3.
That is spend moved between vendors, not spend added. Michael Leone, principal analyst at analyst firm Moor Insights, counts the bill that stays: two governance catalogs, separate cost models, and potentially multiple Snowflake accounts across clouds, with enterprises still deciding which version of a metric is authoritative 3. Snowflake's own blog posts every capability as planned, its use cases flagged as possibly not reflecting functionality at launch 2.
Who wins is a gross-margin question
The setup lands on top of a thinner-margin story already running: our October 26 piece found Snowflake selling AI below the market and asked the December gross-margin print to decide it 6. This deal hands Snowflake distribution through Oracle's contract, while Oracle sets the price on that channel.
Snowflake's gross margin has held between 66% and 68% for ten quarters
Data
| Gross margin | |
|---|---|
| Q1 '24 | 67.1% |
| Q2 '24 | 66.8% |
| Q3 '24 | 65.9% |
| Q4 '24 | 66.2% |
| Q1 '25 | 66.5% |
| Q2 '25 | 67.5% |
| Q3 '25 | 67.8% |
| Q4 '25 | 66.8% |
| Q1 '26 | 66.6% |
| Q2 '26 | 67% |
Snowflake claims more than 14,500 customers, and the market barely moved: the shares closed October 27 at $337.42 against a median analyst target of $443.50, with 178 of 206 analysts rating it a buy 14. Larry Ellison, Oracle's co-founder, took the same stage to dismiss the "SaaS apocalypse" and promise complete industry suites built on AI 5.
The GA date sets the channel's price; the December gross-margin print shows what a resold dollar of Snowflake is worth.
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