Snowflake-Anthropic deepen AI handshake as India emerges as key market

With Snowflake deepening its partnership with Anthropic, company executives are making a strong bet on India as their growth engine. Not just as a key market, but a driver of business innovation as well.

That’s the sense I got during a media briefing for Snowflake Summit 26, where Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product at Snowflake, was asked to describe India’s strategic importance to Snowflake’s Asia-Pacific roadmap.

“India is incredibly, incredibly important for Snowflake from two parts,” Kleinerman said in response, explaining further. “One, it’s a large economy with a lot of potential to drive business directly, but also it’s a country that houses large chunks of global 2,000 and larger organizations.” 

He added that Snowflake runs “a number of programs to make sure that our technology not only reaches India in as good a way as possible, but also how we bring education to India about the usage of Snowflake, because we have a lot of users from multinational companies that sit in India.”

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Vijayant Rai, who leads Snowflake’s India business, was even more blunt in his take. “India is a very crucial growth engine for Snowflake,” he said, before describing the scale of the company’s local build-out. 

“Over the past 18 months or so, we’ve doubled our size, with massive investments. We also have the largest APJ partner ecosystem, which is so important for us serving both Indian customers and global customers based out of India,” emphasised Rai.

That dual mandate, of serving home-grown enterprises while supporting the India arms of global firms, is crucial to Snowflake’s strategy. Rai highlighted the company’s Pune centre of excellence, “which does amazing work for Snowflake globally,” and to the country’s software builders: “There’s a whole lot of Indian software companies which build on top of Snowflake, amazing industry solutions across different industries.” 

The Anthropic partnership to Snowflake’s enterprise AI push

India’s importance is rising just at the right time for Snowflake as it sharpens its enterprise-AI proposition through Anthropic. At Summit 26, the two companies boosted momentum in a partnership that builds on their $200-million tie-up from December 2025. Among other things, it will allow Anthropic’s Claude models to embed directly into Snowflake’s Cortex AI suite across all major cloud platforms.

Their combined pitch is geared towards AI governance. Anthropic provides world-class frontier reasoning through Claude, while Snowflake packages it as part of its enterprise-ready toolkit, running it where customers’ governed data already lives, without having to move any sensitive info. 

“Customers want AI that works directly on their governed data, not in isolated systems,” Kleinerman said in the announcement, noting that Snowflake Cortex Code (which is the firm’s AI coding agent, now powered by models including Claude) has more than 7,100 enterprise customers.

For Indian readers, the bottomline is important. Questions on ROI, interoperability, agent security, and streaming data during the media interaction reflected how seriously Indian enterprises are scrutinising AI spend. 

While India’s appetite for AI remains strong, Kleinerman’s highlighted the problem of data remaining siloed: “Data is still in many different systems, and that will slow down the adoption and the rollout of AI.” His advice to Indian tech leaders is to get the data foundation right first.

That is the bet Snowflake is making in India, that a market full of both ambitious domestic builders and global captive units will reward a platform promising AI with governance built in. With its India headcount doubling and Anthropic’s Claude now at the core of its stack, the company is positioning the country as central to where enterprise AI goes next.

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