DeepSeek took the world by storm just a few weeks ago when it burst onto the scene, causing significant disruption to the stock price of numerous tech companies in the U.S. and EU. In government, legislators were left scratching their heads. However, after the initial, inevitable warnings about “the perils of Chinese tech,” the cloud giants decided to take action.
Snowflake has announced that it will offer the DeepSeek-R1 LLM to its customers. The company has announced a private preview of DeepSeek-R1 on Snowflake Cortex AI. Among other Cloud Wars Top 10 companies, Microsoft and AWS have adopted DeepSeek models. Other Cloud Wars Top 10 companies including Oracle and IBM have publicly discussed competitive yet collaborative responses.
Why DeepSeek?
“As described by DeepSeek, this model, trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT), can achieve performance comparable to OpenAI-o1 across math, code, and reasoning tasks,” Snowflake noted in a blog post.
“Based on DeepSeek’s posted benchmarking, DeepSeek-R1 tops the leaderboard among open source models and rivals the most advanced closed source models globally. Customers can now request an early preview of DeepSeek-R1 on Cortex AI.”
Snowflake customers can request access to DeepSeek-R1, which is currently available in private preview for serverless inference in both batch and interactive use cases. Through Cortex AI, Snowflake allows users to utilize and develop with DeepSeek-R1 while implementing strong governance protocols, such as Cortex Guard, which filters out inappropriate or unsafe responses.
Ultimately, Snowflake recognizes DeepSeek as the first LLM capable of reasoning solely through reinforcement learning without the need for costly, supervised fine-tuning. As a result, Snowflake’s AI Research team aims to enhance DeepSeek-R1 to further reduce inference costs.
Closing Thoughts
While not the only company onboarding DeepSeek, Snowflake is among the first. The adoption has been rapid, but Snowflake is exercising caution.
“The model is hosted in the U.S. within the Snowflake service boundary. We do not share data with the model provider,” the company said. “Once the model is generally available, customers can manage access to the model via role-based access control (RBAC). Account admins can restrict access by selecting the models approved per governance policies.”
What we’re seeing here is openness and cooperation to a model that’s changed the competitive — and pricing — stakes for AI. Anyone familiar with the transformational changes taking place in the AI era understands that now is not the time for isolationism. Technology leaders including Snowflake and other Cloud Wars Top 10 firms are fostering governed and collaborative progress by embracing and exploring disruptive technologies rather than condemning or dismissing them.
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