Earnings Call Transcript - SNOW Q1 2026

Operator, Operator

Good afternoon, and thank you for attending the Snowflake Inc. Q1 Fiscal Year 2026 Earnings Call. My name is Matt, and I will be the moderator for today’s call. All lines have been muted during the presentation, and there will be a chance for questions and answers at the end. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Jimmy Sexton, Head of Investor Relations. Jimmy, please go ahead.

Jimmy Sexton, Head of Investor Relations

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on Snowflake's Q1 Fiscal 2026 Earnings Call. Joining me on the call today are Sridhar Ramaswamy, our Chief Executive Officer; Mike Scarpelli, our Chief Financial Officer; and Christian Kleinerman, our Executive Vice President of Product, who will participate in the Q&A. During today's call, we will review our financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2026 and discuss our guidance for the second quarter and full year fiscal 2026. During today's call, we will make forward-looking statements, including statements related to our business operations and financial performance. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause them to differ materially from our actual results. Information concerning these risks and uncertainties is available in our earnings press release, our most recent Forms 10-K and 10-Q and other SEC reports. All our statements are made as of today based on information currently available to us. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update any such statements. During today's call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. See our investor presentation for a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures and business metric definitions, including adoption. The earnings press release and investor presentation are available on our website at investors.snowflake.com. A replay of today's call will also be posted on the website. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Sridhar.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

Thanks, Jimmy. And hi, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. We are off to a strong start to the year and I couldn't be more proud of our team. Our core business is very strong, our product delivery remains on overdrive, and our go-to-market engine continues to get stronger and stronger. We are in the zone and there's still an enormous opportunity ahead. At Snowflake, our mission is to empower every enterprise to achieve its full potential through data and AI. Our AI data cloud helps customers get more value out of their data, innovate faster and remove friction from their business operations. And as I have shared in the past few quarters, we are extending that value throughout the data lifecycle. We remain disciplined in driving operational rigor across our business, gaining greater efficiency even as we continue to invest aggressively in growth. We are building our strength in executing with urgency and focus to capture the opportunities ahead and sustain durable momentum. Product revenue for Q1 was $997 million, up a strong 26% year-over-year. Excluding the impact of leap year, product revenue grew 28% year-over-year. Our growth rate was stable quarter-over-quarter, showing no deceleration. Remaining performance obligations totaled $6.7 billion with year-over-year growth of 34%. Our net revenue retention was a very healthy 124%. As you can see, we have started the year with strong revenue growth and overall very healthy results, and we are increasing our growth expectations for the year. As I've shared in the past few quarters, Snowflake is obsessed with creating product cohesion to make it easier and easier for our customers to innovate faster and unlock more value from their data from ingestion to insight. Enterprise leaders like Canva and JPMorgan Chase bet their business on Snowflake because our platform is easy to use, connected to enable fluid access to data wherever it sits, and trusted by companies of all sizes and industries. And we are continuing to deliver on our vision of being the end-to-end technology provider for our customers' data journey. We've made important progress in delivering an extensible and flexible connectivity platform, both unstructured as well as structured data. Snowflake connectors, which leverage the technology from our acquisition of Datavolo, enable customers with seamless connectivity and data integration with key platforms like Google Drive, Workday, Slack, SharePoint and more to tap into critical data across the business. Global pharmaceutical leader, AstraZeneca, for example, can now analyze critical business data from systems like SAP and Workday with ease. And customers like CloudZero leverage hundreds of powerful, active data sharing connections to securely exchange data with their partners and customers, driving value across our ecosystem. As our data engineering business continues to show strength, we are helping our customers streamline and scale their data pipeline with less and less friction and realize meaningful cost savings. By consolidating data in Snowflake, Dentsu, a global marketing agency managing data for numerous Fortune 500 clients, reduced costs by 30% from simplified data architecture and reduced dependence on third-party tools. They now use Snowflake Data Clean Room to help global brands securely combine customer data without compromising privacy, enabling more personalized marketing campaigns while reducing risk. On the analytics front, our world-class solutions continue to power mission-critical operations for our customers. Global technology leader, Siemens, is collaborating with Snowflake to help manufacturers unlock new levels of operational efficiency and scale. This enables customers to unify their information technology data such as supply chain management and financial data with operational technology data like data from client systems and industrial equipment, leveraging Siemens' industrial edge and Snowflake AI data cloud to gain better insight, improve machine performance and optimize production processes across their business. And as AI reshapes the enterprise, Snowflake is helping our customers lead the way with AI-ready data. Take Samsung Ads, a leader in connected TV advertising. They leveraged Snowflake to connect advertisers with millions of Samsung consumers while upholding strict privacy standards. By unifying their data on Snowflake, Samsung Ads drives innovation in personalized customer experiences and accelerates the development of new AI and ML-powered advertising features, enabling advertisers to deliver more relevant content and enhance the advertising experience. We have incredible product momentum and we are continuing to innovate at lightning speed. In fact, this quarter alone, we have brought over 125 product capabilities to market, a 100% increase over what we delivered in Q1 of last year. We continue to see strong adoption of open data formats, especially truly open modern table formats like Apache Iceberg. We recently announced that our customers can now leverage many of Snowflake's core capabilities including data sharing, security and performance optimization using Apache Iceberg, giving them even more flexibility to manage and query data at scale. When it comes to AI, it’s amazing to see our progress. A year ago, we were just getting started. Now we have over 5,200 accounts using our AI and machine learning on a weekly basis. Cortex AI has gone from a nascent product area to a foundational pillar of enterprise AI strategies for customers around the world. It's accelerating clinical research for healthcare companies with unified access to information and turning automotive customer reviews into actionable insights to help them personalize their service. As one of the world's largest food and beverage companies, Kraft Heinz, is leveraging Snowflake Cortex to empower its employees with innovative AI tools, Lighthouse or Kraft Heinz AI, their new internal AI assistant. This initiative is designed to revolutionize internal workflows, enhance efficiency and drive AI adoption across the organization, paving the way for future advancement in agentic AI. Earlier this year, we launched Cortex Agent, which is now helping customers like Luminate Data, a leading provider of entertainment insights, scale how they process and retrieve both unstructured and structured data. That foundation is critical for developing, deploying and orchestrating the data agents driving their AI applications. And we have further solidified our leadership by continuing to integrate cutting-edge models into Cortex, ensuring day-one availability of Meta's Llama 4 model. As I shared last quarter, we announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft to host OpenAI models on Microsoft Azure. We continue to provide our customers with choice and flexibility to leverage the world's leading models for their enterprise AI applications. We also launched the first of our AI-powered migration enhancements. Now our customers can use Cortex to test and review issues during their migration journey, making a time-intensive process much more efficient. And this is just the start of what AI can do to make migrations go faster. All of these innovations are focused on driving real value for our customers. We are making it easy to tap into structured data. We are making it easy to tap into unstructured data as well. And we're helping our customers build a strong foundation to lead in the era of agentic AI. We're continuing on this momentum and you'll see even more from us in just a few weeks. During the first week of June, we'll be joined by tens of thousands of customers, partners, and developers at Snowflake Summit, a four-day event, one of our biggest yet, where we will reveal some truly exciting new capabilities we are bringing to market to support our customers at every stage of their data journey. As we innovate, we remain committed to scaling efficiently. Under the leadership of our new Chief Revenue Officer, Mike Gannon, we have renewed focus and rigor across our go-to-market case. We're growing our go-to-market operations while maintaining our close collaboration across engineering, product, marketing, and sales to bring products to market effectively. This ensures that we are able to deliver greater value to our existing customers while continuing to win new ones. We're also expanding our addressable market. With the launch of Snowflake Public Sector Inc. and our recent Department of Defense Impact Level provisional authorization, we're now equipped to deliver mission-critical data and AI solutions to the national security community, including the United States Department of Defense, its military branches, and industry partners. We also introduced new automotive solutions as part of our AI data cloud for manufacturing. These solutions empower companies like CarMax and Nissan with advanced data and AI solutions to drive innovation and efficiency. And they are using our own AI internally to boost productivity. Our go-to-market teams use our sales knowledge assistant powered by Cortex to access insights from our sales knowledge base using natural language, with fast Streamlit apps like our Customer 360 app, they can tap into rich insights on customer consumption front. I'm proud of the discipline and efficiency we have built across the business. We've got a strong operational rhythm, we're investing strategically for growth, and we are laying the groundwork for scale. Mike, why don’t you take us through more of the financial details?

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

Thank you, Sridhar. In Q1, product revenues grew 26% year-over-year to reach $997 million. As Sridhar mentioned, we saw no deceleration in the business when adjusting for leap year. We continued to see meaningful growth from new product offerings. Both Snowpark and Dynamic Tables outperformed expectations in Q1. Other areas of strength included technology and retail sectors. Q1 was a strong quarter for bookings. On our last call, I noted two large customers ran out of capacity in Q4 and elected to delay their larger renewals. As expected, both of these accounts signed $100 million-plus contracts in Q1. We view this variability in bookings as normal for our model. Our focus on new customer acquisitions is yielding positive results. We added 451 net new customers in Q1, growing 19% year-over-year. Turning to margins. In Q1, our non-GAAP product gross margin was 75.7%. Our non-GAAP operating margin was 9%, up 442 basis points year-over-year. We continue to focus on driving greater efficiency across the entire company, while investing for growth. Non-GAAP adjusted free cash flow margin was 20%. As discussed on our last earnings call, we had several large customers purchase as they consumed in Q4. This booking behavior impacts the seasonality of our free cash flow. We expect this year to be more second half weighted. In Q1, we used $491 million to repurchase 3.2 million shares at an average weighted price per share of $152.63. We still have $1.5 billion remaining on our authorization through March 2027. We ended the quarter with $4.9 billion in cash, cash equivalents, short-term and long-term investments. Now moving to our outlook. We expect Q2 product revenue between $1.035 billion and $1.04 billion, representing 25% year-over-year growth. We expect Q2 non-GAAP operating margin of 8%. For FY 2026, we are increasing our revenue guidance to $4.325 billion, representing 25% year-over-year growth. As always, we forecast based on observed customer behavior. We expect non-GAAP gross product gross margin of approximately 75%, non-GAAP operating margin of 8%, non-GAAP adjusted free cash flow margin of 25%. Finally, we will host our Investor Day on June 3 in San Francisco in conjunction with Snowflake Summit. If you are interested in attending, please e-mail [email protected]. Before opening up the line for questions, I just want to update you on my transition as mentioned on the Q4 conference call last quarter. We are in the process of interviewing many great candidates, and we will make an announcement in the future when we have more firm details to share. With that, operator, you can now open up the line for questions.

Operator, Operator

First question is from Keith Weiss with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Sanjit Singh, Analyst

Thank you. This is Sanjit Singh for Keith Weiss. Congrats on an outstanding Q1. Sridhar, I want to talk about some of the trend lines of the business, particularly around consumption as it progressed through the quarter. How was consumption exiting the quarter and through the month of May? That's my first question, then I have a follow-up.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

As you know, we don't comment on consumption within a quarter. Overall, Q1 consumption was very strong coming out of the holiday period, and you see that in our results. Of course, Q1 had one less day compared to Q1 last year. But overall, we feel very good about our consumption.

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

And I would say, Sanjit, we just gave guidance for the quarter and that's based upon the customer behaviors we're seeing through today.

Sanjit Singh, Analyst

Yes, and that Q2 guide was very strong, so I think there's a lot to take away from there. And then, Sridhar, on the product front, you mentioned about the adoption of Cortex continuing to build. I was wondering to see what are the monetization trends associated with Cortex. And to what extent are customers making commitments associated with Cortex in mind and driving that into their overall consumption of Snowflake?

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

I would split that into a few parts, Sanjit. One is that it is very, very clear that people invest in Snowflake. People invest in data systems not just for what they used to be able to do before, which is things like analytics and machine learning, but increasingly for what they will be able to do today and in the future. Part of what I tell our customers is that, by working with us, by bringing data into Snowflake, they are making their data, they are making their processes AI-ready as a firm. And we have taken a very measured approach to how we have had our customers use AI. As you know, we don't sell AI separately. It's not a SKU. Customers are not signing up for contracts on AI so it's on their existing spend. We have focused a lot on use cases that deliver value today. I've talked about some of these examples. It's everything from being able to create chatbots on documents like we’ve created for our own internal enablement or Siemens has created for all of the PDF manuals of their 150,000 devices. Two, putting business data directly into the hands of end users without needing analyst or BI tools in the mix. We are beginning to see compound systems get adopted, where you bring in more than one data source that can disambiguate between the kind of questions that the user has, or multi-step flows where you take data from one source and use that to answer questions or do follow-ups from others. So it's very graduated from that perspective. But the overall point that I want to make is that every user of data, every CTO, including our own, now realizes that their data strategy, especially one with Snowflake, is a direct unlock for whatever they're going to do with AI, both today and several years down the road. So in that sense, I think the road maps are emerging. It's not do AI separately on the side. It is more of invest in Snowflake to get your data house in gear and realize value from AI as we go along.

Sanjit Singh, Analyst

Awesome. Thank you for that.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Kirk Materne with Evercore ISI. Your line is now open.

Kirk Materne, Analyst

Yes. Thanks very much and congrats on a nice start to the year. Sridhar, I was wondering if you could just dive in a little bit on the comment around Snowpark and Dynamic Tables outperforming. I was just curious, and I'm sure it's a bit of both, how much is just the product maturation and sort of the readiness for customers to take those on versus some of the things you guys have got done on the go-to-market side over the last year in terms of enablement and sales enablement with those products? Thanks.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

Good question. Clearly, it's going to be both. You need great products that drive utilities. And in addition to those features that you mentioned, Snowpark and Dynamic Tables, I would say that our investments in things like Iceberg also vastly increase the scope of the kinds of things that our customers can do with the data. And similarly, Snowflake connectors are then going to make more and more data available for these data engineering tools as well. And this is why Christian and I stress the end-to-end data lifecycle a lot. Our motto often is we want to be there from ingestion to insight when it comes to data. Having said that, we have hired, in addition to Mike, amazing leaders in sales that are in charge of driving these more specialized motions. Not everybody in the Snowflake sales team is going to become an expert on our AI product or the latest advancements in Snowflake connectors out of the box. So we have a specialist motion that is very targeted that identifies the highest-value use cases that our customers have, pioneers implementations for them so that they can be used as a template to be repeated in other places and increasingly with our GSI partners. You need to create products that create value, but then a go-to-market team that can enunciate the value and do the hard work of both establishing the flagship customers and then driving sales across the sales teams.

Kirk Materne, Analyst

Great. Thank you all. See you in a couple of weeks.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Raimo Lenschow with Barclays. Your line is now open.

Raimo Lenschow, Analyst

Sridhar, regarding Snowpark and its current adoption, how do you perceive its development now and potentially in the future, particularly in relation to using a single vendor versus managing various data sources within your system as well as other systems? What observations do you have at this time, and how do you foresee this evolving?

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

First of all, I think one of the things that is making us successful, Snowflake as a company is our acknowledgment and willingness to work with customers that have complex data ecosystems. It's always going to be true that there are on-prem legacy systems in most large customers or that there are large data estates that are sitting in cloud storage. But I think what is unique about this moment is that customers are a little unhappy about needing to stitch together many different tools in order to achieve even relatively simple things. If you think about it, if you and your company wanted to build a chatbot on a corporate data repository, it's rather painful if you have to use four different tools in order to produce that. And at the end of it, you won’t even have your governance right because you have to go to various places. Part of what we want to be able to do for cases like that is have Snowflake connectors point to the data repository. If there is any augmentation or transformation of the data that is needed, you get that done, for example, with Snowpark, and then you create an index with Cortex Search and hook it up to a chatbot. I think we will continue to see specialist players that exist, and we partner with them and we value our partnerships with them. But there are also a number of use cases that are ripe for effectively like ease of use and consolidation. And that's the thing that we are leaning into. Anything to add, Christian?

Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product

Maybe super quickly, the other investment that we made is around Iceberg, which also creates opportunity for customers who have an open architecture and be able to mix and match technologies as they see fit.

Raimo Lenschow, Analyst

Yes. Okay, perfect. And then one quick one for Mike. Obviously, it was very good opportunistic on the share buyback side this quarter. How do you think about that traction there for the rest of the year now that shares are starting to look better? Thank you.

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

We will continue to evaluate share buyback on a quarterly basis, and we have no plans right now. We've been more opportunistic in terms of the buyback, but we do fully anticipate between now and 2027, we will utilize that.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Karl Keirstead with UBS. Your line is now open.

Karl Keirstead, Analyst

Okay, great. Thanks. Mike, in the comments from you and Sridhar, there was really no mention of macro per se and no evidence in the numbers that you guys really saw much pressure. You certainly did back in 2022, 2023. And I'm just curious, Mike, how you would draw a contrast. Is it that a lot of the post-COVID optimization efforts are now largely behind you, Snowflake just in a better place in terms of the product portfolio? Or maybe just the degree of macro pressure, the wobbliness we've all seen in the last couple of months is just not as severe as you had to deal with in that post-COVID downturn? Some contrast might be helpful. Thank you.

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

I would say coming out of COVID, I think it was very different. In that environment, we had a lot of digitally native well-funded start-ups that were spending crazy and weren't really focused on costs as much. Our customer base has really evolved into some of the largest companies in the world that are much more mature, that are much more cost-focused. I am not seeing any big optimizations plan within our customers like what we saw coming out of COVID with those. But I will remind you, our customers are constantly optimizing. That may be a little bit, but they're always looking to do things more efficiently and that will continue. I would say in terms of the macro right now, we really have not seen the impact of anything with the current news on tariffs and other issues today. I think if we would have seen that, we would have seen it in the new number of new customers. We have a great new customer add and we had great additions to RPO with this confidence, and that shows the confidence our customers have on making big bets with Snowflake.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

The only small comment I might add is that this is something that our sales team practices as well, which is to make sure that whenever a use case gets implemented, they take the trouble to tidy things up and make sure that things are optimized because our sales team has learned, thanks to 2022 and 2023, that inefficient spend from customers inevitably leads to a contraction later anyway. We are better off making sure that it is always efficient spend.

Karl Keirstead, Analyst

Okay. Thanks. And maybe as a follow-up to Mike. Mike, did Snowflake have any exposure to any of the larger AI natives that on the margin might have given you a little extra oomph this quarter?

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

Nothing extraordinary. We do have a number of AI companies as our customers, but none of them account for more than 1% of our revenue.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Mark Murphy with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Mark Murphy, Analyst

Yes. Congratulations on the impressive execution, Mike. While we anticipated a strong kickoff to the year regarding hiring in sales and marketing, I don't think we could have envisioned this many new hires. It's quite a substantial figure. Could you elaborate on that situation and clarify whether you are bringing in new talent to support a strengthening pipeline around Cortex, Snowpark, or any other emerging opportunity you see?

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

What I want to convey, Mark, is that we're experiencing some softness in our business, and it's not limited to AI; it's something we observe across Snowflake. As you are aware, Q1 is typically our highest period for hiring in sales and marketing since we aim to onboard new personnel at the start of the year to integrate them into our sales kickoff and all the training we conduct for employees regarding new features. Therefore, I wouldn't place too much emphasis on this situation beyond the confidence we have in our business. However, as discussed, we are still focused on achieving operational excellence and continuously evaluating employee productivity. We will expand our workforce as needed, but we will also halt hiring if we don't see productive outcomes from those new employees.

Mark Murphy, Analyst

Okay, understood. And then Sridhar, can you speak to the federal government opportunity because you had touched on it in your comments? Do you think that the Department of Defense is going to run through this initial process of eliminating wasteful spend and then maybe pivot back towards issuing some new RFPs? And then you've got the right certifications. I'm just curious if you think some agencies might be moving off legacy on-prem data warehouses and maybe moving some of that on the Snowflake a little later in the year.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

This is an active topic of conversation with many departments in the government. I think I was in DC a few weeks ago, met with a number of folks, and there is both an increasing awareness of what Snowflake can do. The fact that we have very low operational overhead figures prominently. And there's also a little bit of an astute change where they're very much focused on how do we make sure that our data infrastructure is run efficiently. There's also a desire for things like cross-department sharing of data because that just leads to more efficiency. We'll have more to say on this topic. Mike, our new CFO, is certainly actively looking at this area as well. We are optimistic and hopefully, we'll have more to say about this in the coming quarters.

Mark Murphy, Analyst

Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Kash Rangan with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Kasthuri Rangan, Analyst

Hi. Thank you very much. It's really heartening to see the positive shift in the narrative, strategic positioning, and the execution and handling of everything, so good to see that. Two things still, regardless of, although you're approaching a $4 billion run rate and growing 26%, 27%, which is remarkable. If I could take the liberty of poking at the net revenue retention, so 124% is good. Not many companies even reach that number at your scale if they reach your scale. But you have had 137 new products launched in the most recent quarter, and Scarpelli will be quick to point out that the NRR metric is more of a 24-month trailing metric, which I completely appreciate. But why wouldn't and why shouldn't NRR be better, given the tail effect of new product introduction? You're landing customers at a record pace. And to Mike's point, the yield of enterprise customers is higher quality. You've got AI which didn't exist in 2022. Volatility, which should play to your advantage. So anything on that front? And anything that your new CRO could do to land that number, as good as it is, even higher? And I have a very quick follow-up question. Thank you so much.

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

What I would say on that is a number of our newer customers that are not in that cohort are contributing to our growth beyond what the NRR is. And there was one of our large customers that grew so much last year. In this year, they're still doing very well but they didn't grow as much this year. And that's really the dynamics. It's those newer customers coupled with that. But once again, over time, NRR and revenue growth rate will converge as we become a more mature company.

Kasthuri Rangan, Analyst

Thank you, Mike. It's great to hear from you. Sridhar, I'd like to ask about the hyperscalers. Microsoft discussed fabric recently and seems to be making significant strides in data fabric at scale, which could facilitate AI-driven architecture. This development has clearly caught the attention of major players. How does this impact Snowflake, and what specific aspects of Snowflake's platform will enhance your growth to become a $10-plus billion revenue company? That's all from me. Thank you.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

Just like the hyperscalers are formidable, they are amazing both from an engineering execution and business perspective, but they also work with Anthropic and OpenAI because they are among the best model makers in the world. Similarly, we are very uniquely positioned in terms of being the excellent data platform that is. And we've also learned how cooperating really leads to a better outcome, whether it is with AWS, which is our biggest partner, or more and more with Azure. There are many customers that Azure not play is just a better outcome for everybody that is involved. We have deep partnerships between the team. I think it was six or seven months ago that we announced, for example, that from Snowflake, you could read tables that are in One Lake, and we are also actively talking to them about One Lake being the data layer for Snowflake that's at the bottom. We also collaborate with them at the top, where we have things like Cortex analysts and Cortex agents be available as components in Office Copilot, for example. We very much take this approach of finding customers, for example, who are on a modernization routine or who want to get value, AI value from data and figure out how we can work together. Yes, there is competition, but I think there are more cases than not where we are very effectively working together, and it's on the uptick, especially with Azure.

Kasthuri Rangan, Analyst

That will be huge. Thank you so much.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Matthew Hedberg with RBC. Your line is now open.

Michael Richards, Analyst

Hey, guys. This is Mike Richards on for Matt. Thanks for taking the question. Congrats on the results here. You've clearly made great progress on the products front here, but I'm just curious how you feel about the maturity of the go-to-market motion to support your AI developments. That's it for me. Thanks.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

I'm actually even more pleased with how we've been able to seize the AI opportunity. I've spoken to you folks previously about how we created what we then called the AI ninjas, which were a group of solution engineers that were deeply versed with our AI products, that could be very close to our sales teams around the globe, and just the excitement that our sales team feels about AI, but more importantly, the ability to drive AI use cases at scale to both pitch the vision, but also run POCs for them, win them and get them into production. That's been a pretty remarkable transformation for us. We are now in the process of making this kind of specialized knowledge available to more and more of the sales team. I think it is this combination of specialist teams that know more about a sophisticated area like AI, again doing the initial work, but having more of the team participate in it. That's been hugely positive for us. We apply similar techniques in data engineering, though with data engineering, I would say it's much closer to the knowledge and skill set of more of our sellers. In some sense, it's more natural to them. But AI is doing exceptionally well as well. We have assembled a team of both specialist sellers and AI, but also specialist technical experts that are driving change across the whole sales organization. That, combined with an increasing understanding of what it takes to drive great use cases in general, not just in AI and data engineering but also across other areas like analytics, really heralds a new era of data-driven go-to-market, which I'm very, very happy about.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Brad Zelnick, Analyst

Thank you very much and congratulations on a strong start to the year. Sridhar, I would like to follow up on Kirk's question. As we look at the adoption of Snowpark moving forward, beyond capturing Spark jobs where data was previously moving off platform, could you share insights on your successes in penetrating media or data science use cases? Also, any anecdotal evidence of winning over the data science community and the impact that notebooks are having would be appreciated. Thank you.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

Yes. I'll start the answer. Christian can add on. Our notebooks are doing very well. Several thousand customers are actively using them. There is increasing ability, for example, to train larger and larger machine learning models. As you folks know, like the world has made enormous progress on the basis of machine learning, even though AI is all the hotness these days. But when it comes to many, many interesting use cases, for example, next best action prediction, which the likes of Hilton do, or how to route guests to the next ride, which customers like Disney do. These are all things that we have gained increasing market share around. Notebooks continue to expand. We continue to add product capabilities for training bigger, better, faster models on machines running container services. These tend to be more technical in terms of the kind of people that are involved, the implementations that happen but definitely appealing to the developers, the data scientists, that sort of product-led motion is something that is going on pretty well.

Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product

Yes. One book addition is Snowpark as a collection of libraries and capabilities that help customers do a variety of activities. We see lots of people leveraging it for unstructured data processing, which is a core part of what we're doing. As Sridhar said, we're making more unstructured data available to customers. So Snowpark for extracting structure and signal and doing traditional machine learning is a common use case we're seeing.

Brad Zelnick, Analyst

Thank you. Maybe just a quick follow-up. Mike, guidance implies a robust ramp through the remainder of the year. I think we all see the pace of innovation. Excited for what's to come at Summit. But what, if anything, would you call out that underpins your confidence in things we might not be thinking about or any key assumptions worth calling out? Thank you.

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

I would just say, as I said, our guidance is based upon the observed behavior we see within our customers, coupled with we spend a lot of time, and we have for the last five quarters now, in really identifying new workloads going to production. We have pretty good visibility of those, and we're very close with our customers, and we know what we're doing. Migrations are moving nicely. We announced where we've made Snow Convert available to all of our customers and partners, and we're seeing an uptick in the amount of usage around that, and that's what gives us the confidence in the guidance that we gave.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Brent Thill with Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Bo Yin, Analyst

This is Bo Yin on for Brent Thill. Thanks for taking the question. With features like Cortex AI analyst and Cortex agents that can help users to write more efficient queries, are you seeing more query optimization as Cortex AI adoption picks up? And what's been a net impact on usage so far in terms of net new queries and query optimization? Thanks.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

With features like Cortex analyst, end users are somewhat distanced from composing the SQL query. The user semantic model helps to understand the user's intent and automatically generates the SQL. We have introduced Copilot-like capabilities for worksheets, where users can write SQL or Python, as well as within notebooks. I believe there is a significant wave of innovation coming, some of which we will showcase at Summit. The standard for code writing is shifting with modern platforms like Cursor and others that provide Copilot-like assistance, greatly enhancing productivity by increasing both the quantity of queries written and the overall work that can be accomplished. While we do not have specific metrics showing a percentage increase in queries, we are pleased to assist our customers in writing queries and code more rapidly and debugging more efficiently.

Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product

Yes. We're saying in these calls and other forums that our preference, our goal is to make sure that customers are optimized all the time. I think none of us like to go and spend money and then optimize it and go up and down. We put a lot of effort in technology, some of the core examples that you have are part of that, but query insights, cost insights, governance insights all over this product, how we help customers be in a better optimized state all along.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Patrick Colville with Scotiabank. Your line is now open.

Patrick Colville, Analyst

Alright. Thank you so much for taking my question. I guess my one is for Sridhar. Last year, the Arctic LLM was launched. My question is how important are first-party foundation models to Snowflake's strategy as of today? Or is there like a slight pivot more to kind of partnering with third-party foundation models?

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

I’ve said this before, I think the business of training a truly large foundation model has gotten to be a very expensive proposition. We have an amazing team of AI researchers but they tend to focus more on things like training. We have always blogged, for example, about how we can be much more efficient, like much more correct at generating SQL queries by using post-training techniques. This makes Cortex analyst better. I think at least for now, the era of us training, let's call it, frontier foundation models is not something that we are actively looking at. But the research team continues to do amazing work, as I said, in post-training but also in areas like inference optimization, which has a huge impact on latency, and it has a huge impact on margins in AI. So we continue to have a robust presence in the area but we work with partners. Meta is a big partner. We were a day-one launch partner for the Llama 4 model that came on. We actively collaborate with Anthropic and OpenAI, Mistral, and lots of model providers. The one fun thing I'll add is that in the area of embedding models, these are small unsung heroes, but they are the models that essentially produce fingerprints of documents that you want to index for a chatbot, for example. We have robust embedding models that we have open-sourced. We have to be opportunistic about where we can create value because we can't afford to spend the billions of dollars that it takes to be a part of research today.

Patrick Colville, Analyst

Crystal clear. Thank you, Sridhar. And can I just squeeze in a follow-on for Mike? I mean, the bottom line is clearly less of a focus when you're growing the top line 26% with the possibility to reaccelerate in the back half of the fiscal year. But one key operating margin was strong. Nonetheless, the fiscal year operating margin was left unchanged, as was the fiscal year free cash flow margin target. So I guess, what were the puts and takes there as to why leave those targets unchanged?

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

Well, what I would say is in Q2 is when we have a big user event, and that's a very expensive event, Summit that we operate, and that typically has an impact on our operating margin in Q2. And that's factored in. We will just continue to revise our forecast for the year on a quarterly basis going forward.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

I actually think that we are being pretty thoughtful when it comes to expanding our operating margin. It was 4% in Q1 last year. It's 9% Q1 this year. This is part of the benefit of practicing what we preach around AI. We spend a lot of time figuring out how engineers can be more productive with AI, how we can get small work done. Similarly, in the sales team, we want to automate many of the tasks that our sales team doesn't like to do anyway so that they can be more productive in front of sellers. We feel that we are in quite a bit of a Goldilocks moment where we can continue to grow revenue very strongly while continuing to be very efficient when it comes to operating margin and free cash flow.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Alex Zukin with Wolfe Research. Your line is now open.

Alex Zukin, Analyst

Thank you for taking my question. I have a high-level inquiry for you, Sridhar or Mike. It seems that the demand environment remains consistent, unaffected by macro headlines. You are experiencing new product adoption that exceeds expectations. Are you noticing any changes? Is this shift being influenced by identifiable AI tailwinds? Are customers investing more in their AI infrastructure with Snowflake or building agents? Specifically, are they focusing more on data instead of just the models? Please help us understand and visualize the AI tailwind and your role within the AI budgets that many of your large customers are clearly allocating.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

As I was saying earlier, I think more and more people have internalized that to be good at AI, your data needs to be in here. What we have done on our side is to create a product, whether it's a semantic model that is very close to the data, usable by anyone, mind you, not just by Snowflake, but also products like Cortex Analyst that can actually unlock the value of that data, both by immediate use, like a chatbot on a specific data set but much more importantly for use in an agentic workflow. More and more of our conversations can now focus on what creates value from a business perspective. So AI for Snowflake, rather than being this additional thing that we do, in some ways, becomes the natural end state for investing well in data means. Of course, we are using AI ourselves both within the company but also in different aspects of the product. We talked about code generation and notebooks being accelerated by Cursor-like experiences. On the other hand, we make Snow Convert, our conversion tool free, so that anyone could use them. We’re bringing agentic workflows into Snow Convert so that people can do things like testing with synthetic data far sooner than what they would have done in a traditional waterfall-style migration. I’d say it’s a combination of all of these trends that are driving Snowflake forward.

Alex Zukin, Analyst

Excellent. And maybe just as a follow-up, maybe Sridhar for you or for Christian. There's been a lot of excitement that we've sensed around Gen2 and particularly the performance improvements that your customers are seeing. I guess maybe just touch on, is this potentially leading to unlocking new use cases around the capabilities introduced? Or how should we think about the potential for some of these new functions as they percolate in the platform?

Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product

Yes, Christian here. The best way to think about Gen2 is our latest and greatest compute environment. What we've done is we've combined the latest hardware instances that we can get from the cloud providers, which are often faster but also more expensive with a good number of software and improvements that we have. At the end of the day is part of our eternal ongoing promise to customers to always deliver the best price performance of the market. Some of the benchmarks that we have on Gen2 are completely phenomenal relative to Snowflake a year ago, but also to many of the competitive patterns there. Think of it as price performance, which continues to correlate with time to insight and time to value, and it's a material step forward.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Joel Fishbein with Truist. Your line is now open.

Joel Fishbein, Analyst

Thank you for your question. Mike, you earlier mentioned that you had the strongest new logo quarter, which is fantastic. I'm curious to know if this is due to better execution and a strategic focus, or if you're experiencing a more favorable win rate in the competitive landscape. Additionally, could you share which verticals the two $100 million deals were in? Thank you.

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

So on the $100 million deals, they were both in the financial services vertical. What I would say about the number of new customers is this is not a result of something we put in place this quarter. We started last year with really breaking out an acquisition team that is just focused on new logos, and we're seeing the benefits of the groundwork that we put in place last year and we're pleased with the results. I think we have a very good leader there, and we're replicating what we're doing in North America and in EMEA as well. So we're pleased with the number of new logos that we've added and it's a big focus of ours.

Joel Fishbein, Analyst

Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Brad Reback with Stifel. Your line is now open.

Brad Reback, Analyst

Great. Thanks very much. Last quarter, Mike, you talked about some changes to the sales force comp plan as related to bookings and commits, not just consumption. Maybe an update on how that's tracking and if that had any impact on the strong bookings in the quarter.

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

Yes. Obviously, I think it helped, but the real strong bookings for those two big deals that we knew were going to come in. I would say, I think in general, salespeople are happy with having a bookings component, but still the principal driver is consumption revenue. As a reminder, we paid on bookings last year. It's not like we weren't doing it last year. We just are giving them a quota for bookings as well. I think it's going to take some time to see the real roots of that change, whether that worked or not, but I'm pleased for Q1. I think they had a very solid Q1, and it definitely helped.

Brad Reback, Analyst

That's great. And then just a quick one getting into the weeds a little bit. CapEx was up a bunch to a fairly high number. Is there one-time items there or is this the new level?

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

No. The CapEx was really associated with our new headquarters in San Mateo. As I spoke about previously, we signed a new lease in a Menlo Park office and there's a fair bit of CapEx that went into that as well as in Bellevue. I talked about that before too. That really opened this week, that office, and there was a fair bit of CapEx that went into that as well. I'm not expecting any major office buildouts the next couple of years actually now.

Operator, Operator

Perfect. Thank you. Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Tyler Radke with Citi. Your line is now open.

Tyler Radke, Analyst

Yes. Thanks for taking the question here. Mike, you talked about some strength in technology customers in the quarter. I was wondering if you could double-click on that. And what are you seeing specifically among larger AI-native customers in terms of their consumption?

Mike Scarpelli, CFO

It's good. But as I called it before, we have a number of AI companies that are our customers, and they're still less than 1% of our revenue.

Operator, Operator

Okay, great. And the follow-up question I had was for Sridhar. We recently saw Databricks acquire Neon, which was a company that Snowflake Ventures had invested in. I'm just curious if we can get an update on your strategy around Unistore. And just sort of your view on the positioning or some of these serverless databases that are out there in the market.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

We believed in transactional systems for a long time. This is why we got to work on Unistore about five years ago. Unistore, the product, is doing very well. The standard is nothing to be scoffed at and it's adopted widely. We are very happy with what we have invested in transactional stores so far. We will continue to invest in the area because it's a very natural addition to what we do.

Operator, Operator

Okay. Thank you.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO

In closing, Snowflake is at the center of today's enterprise AI evolution. Our focus on making Snowflake easy to use, connected to enable fluid access to data wherever it sits, and trusted for enterprise-grade performance is what makes us differentiated and beloved by our customers. We are committed to supporting them through their end-to-end data journey from inception to insights. Our product revenue growth and strong outlook for FY 2026 demonstrates our continued ability to execute at scale. Our pace of innovation coupled with our ability to bring products to market quickly is driving high growth, and we are committed to maintaining that momentum. We believe Snowflake's long-term profile is one that showcases durable, high growth and continued margin expansion. It's an exciting time for our company. I look forward to sharing more of our progress in the quarters ahead. Thank you all for joining us.

Operator, Operator

That concludes the call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.