Buy Snowflake Stock, J.P. Morgan Says. It’s Critical for AI Agents.

Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

Key Points

• J.P. Morgan reiterated an Overweight rating and a $255 price target for Snowflake shares.
• AI agents are expected to drive the next wave of tech growth, benefiting Snowflake as a data management vendor.
• Seventy-five percent to eighty percent of clients reportedly want to use Snowflake to centralize and prepare corporate data for AI, according to an industry contact.

Snowflake will be a big beneficiary from the coming wave of artificial-intelligence agents, according to J.P. Morgan .

On Thursday, analyst Mark Murphy reaffirmed his Overweight rating and $255 price target for Snowflake shares.

Several technology executives expect the advent of AI agents, which are programs that have the ability to take simple directions and complete multistep tasks, to drive the next wave of tech growth.

Snowflake is a leading vendor of data warehouse and cloud data management solutions.

“Conversations [with companies] reveal that AI is an unambiguous catalyst to customers’ urgency to ensure their data is in order, with the first step being migrating from on-prem [on-premise] solutions to modern data cloud platforms such as Snowflake,” he wrote.

In early trading Thursday, Snowflake stock was up 3.3% to $249.61. The shares have surged 62% this year.

The analyst said AI agents will not work well unless internal corporate data are managed and compiled correctly. According one of the analyst’s industry contacts, 75% to 80% of their clients want to build AI on Snowflake to centralize and prepare their corporate data.

“Our sense is that the concept of data being central is translating from a theory to practice as it becomes a bona fide gating factor to effective AI adoption,” he wrote.

Write to Tae Kim at tae.kim@barrons.com