Introducing Even Easier-to-Use Snowflake Adaptive Compute with Better Price/Performance

In today’s AI-powered world, organizations must continuously find new ways to accelerate time to value from all their data to stay ahead of the competition. For decades, data and AI platforms have required organizations to spend valuable time and resources on cluster spin-up and spin-down, disruptive upgrades, manual performance tuning and laborious optimizations. 

In 2012, Snowflake revolutionized the data world with our virtual warehouses that had automated cluster management, maintenance, upgrades and regular performance improvements — all without any downtime — for a truly easy-to-use service. Continuously improving our compute to make warehouses even faster and even easier to use, with better price/performance has been a key priority.  

Every day, we strive to be the market leader in fast performance for all workloads and continue to iterate rapidly to automatically improve performance by doing the heavy lifting on behalf of our customers. In fact, Snowflake is excited to announce that over the past 12 months ending May 2, 2025, Snowflake has delivered 2.1x faster performance for core analytics workloads through Standard Warehouse – Generation 2 (Gen2) (generally available). Gen2 is an updated version of Snowflake’s current virtual Standard Warehouse that has upgraded hardware and additional performance enhancements. 

Snowflake is also excited to announce a new service called Snowflake Adaptive Compute (in private preview) that takes away the undifferentiated heavy lifting of making infrastructure choices to save time and money. Adaptive Compute enables enhanced ease of use with better price/performance. Snowflake will support warehouses created using the Adaptive Compute service that are called Adaptive Warehouses (in private preview).   

Even easier to use 

With Adaptive Compute, minimal configuration is required as Snowflake will automatically select the appropriate cluster size(s), the number of clusters, and auto-suspend/resume duration for jobs on your behalf. Users no longer need to think about the warehouse size, concurrency settings, multi-cluster warehouse settings, or auto-suspend/resume semantics. Even query routing is done intelligently to the right-sized clusters without any user action.

With Adaptive Warehouses created using this new compute service, users still interact with many familiar aspects of current virtual warehouses including having a similar billing model, getting granular information from ACCOUNT_USAGE views and the ability to use FinOps tools such as budgets and resource monitors. However, all jobs running on all the Adaptive Warehouses in an account go to a shared pool of resources within that account.

Converting from a standard virtual warehouse to an Adaptive Warehouse is a simple alter command that’s done without any downtime. Customers have told us it takes a non-trivial amount of time and effort to consolidate workloads because warehouse names often are hard coded in pipelines and scripts, which could lead to disruption. With Adaptive Warehouses, users can simply convert their production workloads in batches, while still maintaining existing warehouse names, policies, permissions and showback/chargeback reporting structure. 

Even better price/performance 

At Snowflake, our product philosophy is focused on continuously and automatically enhancing performance for customers by regularly refining our core engine and doing the heavy lifting on behalf of our customers. In addition to being effortless to use, Adaptive Compute will leverage the latest and greatest hardware and performance enhancements available from Snowflake. Adaptive Compute also has optimized resource sharing as queries leverage a shared pool of clusters within your account to maximize efficiency.    

What customers are saying 

“We are excited to be part of the private preview of Adaptive Warehouses, which will allow us to consolidate many warehouses across different workloads while still being able to effectively use built-in FinOps capabilities like Budgets. Adaptive Warehouses will make it effortless for Pfizer to manage and optimize our warehouses while delivering outsized performance improvements,” said Steve Ring, Director of Enterprise Database Solutions at Pfizer. 

Learn more

• Get started with Standard Warehouse – Generation2 

• Read more about Pfizer’s experience with Adaptive Compute and Adaptive Warehouses 

Forward Looking Statements

This article contains forward-looking statements, including about our future product offerings, and are not commitments to deliver any product offerings. Actual results and offerings may differ and are subject to known and unknown risk and uncertainties. See our latest 10-Q for more information.