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While Big Tech has soared, some investors are pivoting to real assets – like energy infrastructure and clean tech.
Our latest report highlights four energy transition stocks that may benefit from this shift in investor sentiment.
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Snowflake’s Borderless Data Exchange Is a Revenue Bet
Snowflake has spent the better part of 2026 dismantling the last structural reason a multinational organization might hesitate to run its data operations on a single platform. The company’s upgraded cloud data exchange now enables cross-region and cross-cloud sharing, meaning a financial institution running accounts in Tokyo, Frankfurt, and New York can push live data between those environments without copying files or maintaining bespoke ETL pipelines. It also aims to make transfer costs more predictable, an area that has long made cross-cloud architectures painful to budget.
The bull case is grounded in numbers that are hard to argue with. In its fiscal second quarter ended July 31, 2026, Snowflake reported product revenue of $1.49 billion, up 37% year over year, with 829 Forbes Global 2000 customers on the platform. Those are the exact organizations that cross-region data sharing is designed for. Nomura, a major Japanese financial group, has discussed the need to consolidate data across regions and support reporting across multiple regulatory jurisdictions simultaneously. That use case, one governed data layer that supports multiple regulators at the same time, is precisely what the upgraded exchange is meant to make more achievable without bespoke infrastructure.
The technical expansion is substantive. Snowflake has extended its zero-ETL data sharing to open table formats, including Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake, allowing providers to share data across regions and clouds without requiring them to maintain ETL jobs. Snowflake’s Egress Cost Optimizer is designed to help providers manage and reduce cross-cloud auto-fulfillment transfer costs. Management raised its full-year product revenue forecast to $6.07 billion from $5.84 billion, and that revision arrived alongside a higher adjusted operating margin outlook, signaling that the cross-cloud buildout is intended to pull revenue forward without proportionally inflating costs.
The bear case is subtler but worth taking seriously. The exchange upgrades reinforce Snowflake’s position most with customers already inside its ecosystem, or at least those willing to transact through Snowflake’s sharing primitives. Organizations running alternative warehouses can consume some shared assets through open protocols, but many real-world exchange scenarios still work best when both sides are operating with Snowflake accounts and governance constructs, which can limit the audience for certain providers. That is a moat for existing customers and a wall for prospective ones simultaneously.
There is also a cost nuance that large enterprises will price carefully. Cross-cloud and cross-region access can involve transfer charges and platform fees, and the “query from anywhere” pitch is real, but “anywhere” still has a meter. Finance and compliance teams at multinationals do not accept open-ended consumption models without hard spending caps, and Snowflake’s cross-region billing complexity will require careful governance.
On balance, the exchange upgrade tightens Snowflake’s grip on the segment that drives its highest revenue. Its net revenue retention rate was 125% as of January 31, 2026, which tells you existing multinationals are already expanding. The cross-region sharing improvements give those customers a concrete reason to centralize more, faster. That dynamic favors the bulls, provided Snowflake keeps the billing model legible enough that enterprise procurement teams do not treat complexity as a reason to diversify elsewhere.
