Snowflake, the enterprise AI data cloud company, is significantly increasing its investments in India, viewing the country as a "land of opportunities" for data and AI. Vijayant Rai, India MD of Snowflake, stated that the company is "doubling down" on India as an investment destination to serve the Indian market, global customers from India, and invest in AI and skill sets within the country.
This strategic expansion includes growing its headcount to over 700 employees by the end of 2025. To support this growth, Snowflake recently opened a new office in Mumbai and plans to expand its presence in Bengaluru by the end of 2025. These expansions will support teams across sales, operations, solutions engineering, marketing, and the Pune Center of Excellence (CoE), which Snowflake describes as the only one of its kind in the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region. The company is adding approximately 100 new hires across functions like sales, operations, solutions engineering, and marketing.
Snowflake is also planning to establish a dedicated research and development (R&D) center in India. The company's CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, noted that many of their large US customers, including banks, have entire divisions operating out of India, making it crucial for Snowflake to have a strong local presence to support them. The expansion into Pune is intended to bolster customer support and enhance the company's ability to assist clients with digital transformation initiatives.
India has become a pivotal region for Snowflake's APJ operations, with nearly 50% of Snowflake's partner ecosystem in the APJ region rooted in India, underscoring the country's strategic importance in Snowflake's global growth plans. These partners include firms like Deloitte, EY, LTIMindtree, TCS, AWS, and Microsoft.
Snowflake's focus in India is on high-scale enterprise AI, helping companies embed artificial intelligence into their existing data infrastructure by integrating with AI models from industry leaders like OpenAI, Meta, and DeepSeek. Key sectors driving demand for Snowflake's data and AI solutions in India include BFSI, retail, and independent software vendors (ISVs). India's unique position as a market with companies handling "multiple petabytes" of data creates specific opportunities for Snowflake, whose platform is designed to handle large-scale data operations efficiently.
The expansion comes as India's data center industry is projected to reach 1825 MW by 2027, requiring significant infrastructure investment to support the growing demand from cloud service providers. The Indian data center market, valued at $6.48 billion in 2024, is expected to reach $10.70 billion by 2030, creating an attractive environment for cloud data platforms like Snowflake to establish a stronger presence.
Snowflake is also investing in developing a data-proficient talent pool in India for the growing AI ecosystem. The company has collaborated with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and industry body Nasscom-led skilling platform FutureSkills Prime. Through this collaboration, Snowflake and Nasscom aim to enroll 1 lakh professional and student learners in Snowflake's on-demand free entry-level data and AI skills courses in the next two years.
Snowflake's client list in India includes companies such as Swiggy, Urban Company, Marico, and Piramal Finance. Through its product Cortex AI, Snowflake also assists companies in building generative AI applications and managing and fine-tuning their large language models (LLMs).
Vijayant Rai was appointed as the new Managing Director for India at Snowflake in January 2024. He is responsible for driving growth and the go-to-market strategy, accelerating strategic partnerships, and driving the adoption of Snowflake's Data Cloud across sectors including CPG, manufacturing, public sector, startups, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and BFSI.
