Enterprise AI Adoption And Cloud Migration Will Generate Lasting Momentum

Key Takeaways

• Growing enterprise focus on AI and modernization is driving strong demand for Snowflake's platform, supporting future revenue growth and customer expansion.
  
• Continuous product innovation and expanding data collaboration features are increasing customer stickiness and recurring revenue, while operational efficiency boosts margin potential.
  
• Reliance on migration-driven growth, evolving tech threats, fierce competition, early-stage AI monetization, and rising costs collectively threaten sustained revenue and margin expansion.

Catalysts

Provides a cloud-based data platform for various organizations in the United States and internationally.

• Accelerating enterprise adoption of AI and advanced analytics is fueling incremental demand for Snowflake's platform, as evidenced by nearly 50% of new customers citing AI as a primary driver, and over 25% of all deployed use cases leveraging AI-setting up higher future revenue growth as companies increasingly budget for AI-driven workloads.
  
• The ongoing transition from legacy, on-premise databases to cloud data platforms offers years of migration runway, with Snowflake benefiting disproportionately from large enterprises prioritizing modernization and migrating new workloads-supporting sustained growth in customer count, net revenue retention, and expansion opportunities.
  
• Rapid product innovation, including the launch of ~250 new features and expanded offerings such as Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex AI SQL, and Postgres support, is increasing average revenue per user and deepening customer stickiness, which should drive recurring revenue and long-term topline growth.
  
• Broader adoption of Snowflake's Data Cloud marketplace and data sharing/collaboration features (with 40% of customers now sharing data) is creating powerful network effects that both improve customer retention and increase usage, translating into higher revenue and improved margin leverage as scale increases.
  
• Improving operational rigor, growing gross margins (76.4% gross margin this quarter), and recent investments in sales capacity suggest potential for further operating leverage and net margin expansion as new product lines and regions (such as EMEA) reach scale-enhancing future earnings power.

Snowflake Future Earnings and Revenue Growth

Assumptions

• Analysts are assuming Snowflake's revenue will grow by 23.8% annually over the next 3 years.
• Analysts are not forecasting that Snowflake will become profitable in next 3 years. To represent the Analyst Price Target as a Future PE Valuation we will estimate Snowflake's profit margin will increase from -33.5% to the average US IT industry of 6.4% in 3 years.
• If Snowflake's profit margin were to converge on the industry average, you could expect earnings to reach $497.5 million (and earnings per share of $1.49) by about September 2028, up from $-1.4 billion today.
• In order for the above numbers to justify the analysts price target, the company would need to trade at a PE ratio of 224.7x on those 2028 earnings, up from -55.5x today. This future PE is greater than the current PE for the US IT industry at 32.4x.
• Analysts expect the number of shares outstanding to remain consistent over the next 3 years.
• To value all of this in today's terms, we will use a discount rate of 8.81%, as per the Simply Wall St company report.

Snowflake Future Earnings Per Share Growth

Risks

• Snowflake's acceleration in revenue growth is largely driven by migration projects (on-premise to cloud and workload expansions), which historically cause temporary spikes in consumption that normalize over time; if migration activity slows or the pool of available migrations shrinks, core product revenue growth could decelerate, undermining long-term topline expansion.
  
• The company remains highly dependent on its core data warehousing and analytics offerings, with executive acknowledgment that markets and technologies, especially AI, could potentially disrupt existing business models-including Snowflake's own-posing existential risk to revenue if innovation or execution lags.
  
• Competition from hyperscalers (Microsoft, AWS, Google) and specialized competitors (Databricks, Palantir, open-source platforms) is intensifying, with major players integrating analytics and AI natively into their clouds; this could compress pricing power, drive margin pressure, and make it harder to retain or upsell large enterprise customers, directly impacting gross margins and net earnings.
  
• While Snowflake has introduced over 250 new features and major AI-driven products, monetization of many AI-related offerings is still in early stages and heavily reliant on specialist sales; if broad and durable revenue contribution from these products does not materialize, revenue growth may fall short of current expectations.
  
• Rapid scaling of personnel (notably in sales and marketing) and continued aggressive investment in R&D is boosting operating costs, and if productivity gains from these hires do not match increased expense, operating margins and free cash flow generation could face prolonged pressure, challenging longer-term profitability.

Valuation

• The analysts have a consensus price target of $260.624 for Snowflake based on their expectations of its future earnings growth, profit margins and other risk factors. However, there is a degree of disagreement amongst analysts, with the most bullish reporting a price target of $440.0, and the most bearish reporting a price target of just $170.0.
  
• In order for you to agree with the analyst's consensus, you'd need to believe that by 2028, revenues will be $7.8 billion, earnings will come to $497.5 million, and it would be trading on a PE ratio of 224.7x, assuming you use a discount rate of 8.8%.
  
• Given the current share price of $229.33, the analyst price target of $260.62 is 12.0% higher.
  
• We always encourage you to reach your own conclusions though. So sense check these analyst numbers against your own assumptions and expectations based on your understanding of the business and what you believe is probable.