Snowflake Opens AI Hub at Menlo Park Headquarters

Snowflake heated up the Bay Area office market last year with a record-setting lease. Since then, the cloud data company has transformed its headquarters into a hub for artificial intelligence moguls across the region.

The firm opened its “Silicon Valley AI Hub” last week. It’s a 30,000-square-foot space on the top floor of its Menlo Park headquarters, the San Francisco Standard reported.

The space is designed for companies and developers interested in AI to exchange knowledge and develop their products. In a recent event there, executives at OpenAI, Windsurf and Glean gave their ideas on how to scale AI startups, per the Standard.

To inaugurate the space, 13 startups will set up operations at the hub over the course of three months. They’ll have access to coworking space, professional video studios and snacks for employees, as well as Snowflake’s computing infrastructure and proximity to the firm’s investor network.

That’s not all; next year Snowflake will expand the space with a rooftop restaurant and bar, transforming it from a simple workspace to a destination for workers on and off the clock.

The public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 prompted Snowflake to lean hard into AI. Between 2020 — when it had its IPO — and 2025, the company’s headcount ballooned from 1,000 to 8,000. As the firm grew, it needed space to accommodate all of its employees.

Last year, it settled on subleasing a 773,000-square-foot, three-building campus in Menlo Park that Meta had pre-leased and built out but never occupied. That deal is still the Bay Area’s largest post-pandemic office lease.

With summer melting away, Snowflake is preparing for a blizzard of new releases. In November, the company is set to unveil a host of AI products. While it’s partnered in the past with OpenAI and Anthropic to integrate language models into its products, Snowflake wants to cross-pollinate with as many AI voices as possible, and its AI hub is meant to be the meeting place.

The company plans to host up to 10 events a week at the AI hub, Snowflake chief marketing officer Denise Persson said. Those could include networking dinners, hackathons and educational sessions. The hope is that Snowflake will be able to discover and work with some of the brightest new minds in the booming sector.

— Chris Malone Méndez