Snowflake held a press conference for its 'Data Cloud World Tour' at COEX in Samseong-dong on the 4th and shared updates on its Korean business. Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, said, "Korea is an important strategic market for Snowflake, not only because of its position in the global economy, but also as a manufacturing powerhouse."

Snowflake Korea CEO Kiyoung Choi also said, “Korea is an important market as it is only our second visit to the country,” and “We will accelerate our advance into the Korean market based on the recent collaboration between Microsoft (MS) and NVIDIA.”

The newly launched ‘Snow Park Container Service’ last June is the stepping stone for this. Snowpark Container Service is a Snowpark runtime execution environment that allows you to create customized container images to meet your business requirements and deploy them on Snowflake.

Snowflake’s collaboration with NVIDIA will enable developers to easily run workloads leveraging NVIDIA GPUs on the Snowflake platform. “We’re particularly excited about the potential of NVIDIA GPU-based generative AI within Snowflake,” said Christian Kleinermann, vice president of products at Snowflake.

Snowflake enables customers to build custom LLMs using their own internal data based on the NVIDIA platform for large-scale language model (LLM) development and NVIDIA GPUs. Snowflake is an in-container service that supports all frameworks such as fine-tuning for models. Through this, companies can develop various advanced generative AI apps based on LLM, chatbots, search and summary, etc.

Snowflake also secured a partnership with AI21 Labs. “Support for LLM is one of the new features of Snowpark Container Service, and we plan to expand our customer cases and expand cooperation with partners in various fields,” said Vice President Christian.

He also said, “Because Snowflake aims to be a horizontal platform that achieves integration, customers will be able to mix and match and connect AI models, including LLMs, on the secure Snowflake platform as the generative AI market landscape evolves in the future.”

Lastly, CEO Choi Ki-young said, “Data strategy is essential for AI strategy. Snowflake’s direction is to create AI intelligence based on the high value-added data of companies that Snowflake has secured in large quantities and the framework of GPU powerhouse Nvidia.”

Meanwhile, Vice President Christian also emphasized Snowflake’s integrated platform. “Snowflake has evolved to become a comprehensive platform that supports not only simple data collection but also all data-based operations,” he said.

Snowflake is used by 70% of the top 10 global investment banks. Although the Korean branch has been open for less than two years, it has major companies such as Samsung Electronics, LG Uplus, Kakao Games, Landrygo, Amore Pacific, Nexon, LG Chem, SK Broadband, Pulmuone, CJ, etc. as clients.

Snowflake is also actively supporting localization to conquer the Korean market. It said it plans to provide education to customers through specific demos and explanations of functions, and to help customers communicate with each other through community activation.