Agentic AI Is Reshaping Data Infrastructure—Are Data Warehouses Obsolete?

In the spring of 2024, Snowflake, a star in the cloud data warehouse space, announced a change in leadership: Sridhar Ramaswamy, former head of Google’s advertising business, succeeded the legendary CEO Frank Slootman, who had helped Snowflake reach a $60 billion valuation.

If you think this is just a routine executive shuffle, you’re not seeing the full picture. The real implication is that the paradigm of the data warehouse world is undergoing a quiet yet profound transformation.

Technological evolution is never linear—it’s about leaps. From OLTP databases to MPP data warehouses, from localized MPP computing to vectorized cloud data engines, each stage represents a leap to the next generation of technology—and from one dominant product to the next.

Slootman represented the “golden age of data warehousing.” He bet on cloud-native, multi-tenant architectures and positioned Snowflake as the central hub of the next-generation data platform. Under ...