Snowflake’s $250M “Crunchy” Bet: How Two Smart Acquisitions Are Fueling Its AI War With Databricks!

Snowflake has taken a bold strategic leap in its battle for AI supremacy by acquiring Crunchy Data, a leading PostgreSQL-based database company, for approximately $250 million. Coming shortly after Databricks’ $1 billion acquisition of Neon, this move signals an intensifying war for enterprise customers who want to build AI agents using their own data. Crunchy Data’s roughly 100 employees are set to join Snowflake as the company integrates Crunchy into a new product offering called Snowflake Postgres. The announcement also builds on Snowflake’s prior acquisition of Datavolo—an ingestion-focused startup bought just six months ago. These back-to-back acquisitions reflect Snowflake’s clear intent to become a full-stack data and AI platform capable of handling structured and unstructured data from ingestion to inference. As CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy and SVP of Engineering Vivek Raghunathan emphasized during Analyst Day, the company’s goal is to dominate every layer of the data lifecycle—from ingestion and transformation to predictive analytics and AI deployment. Below are the four key drivers behind why the Crunchy Data and Datavolo deals are central to Snowflake’s evolving AI strategy—and how they help it directly counter Databricks.