Adds details on AWS deal

By Kanishka Ajmera

May 28 - Snowflake shares surged 39% premarket on Thursday after it raised annual revenue forecast and a $6 billion deal for access to Amazon's chips bolstered investor confidence that the data platform is emerging as a major beneficiary of the AI boom.

The five-year deal with Amazon Web Services provides Snowflake SNOW.N with crucial supply of AWS's Graviton chips at a time when compute capacity has been constrained due to a massive surge in AI usage.

At least 25 analysts raised their price targets on the data storage and analytics company following the announcements, putting its median price target at $275, up from $230 before the earnings report on Wednesday.

If pre-market gains hold, Snowflake is set to add more than $20 billion to its market cap of $60.75 billion.

Snowflake's shares are down 20% so far this year, and the massive jump "tells you just how much scepticism had built up as data names were caught in the broader AI software sell-off," said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.

"But it also shows how quickly sentiment can turn when a company shows AI is already helping the top line, rather than simply decorating the slide deck."

Peers Datadog and MongoDB rose 5.9% and 10.4%, respectively, riding Snowflake's blowout results.

After being battered by fears AI would disrupt enterprise software, the cloud firm is now embedding the technology across a platform that lets businesses unify data from multiple sources, run analytics and build AI tools.

The company has seen strong adoption of its AI tools such as Cortex Code and Snowpark, which help businesses build generative AI applications and deploy machine learning models on their data.

The AWS partnership will boost Snowflake's enterprise AI push through Graviton processors and infrastructure, deeper integrations and joint go-to-market efforts, while helping customers scale AI projects from pilot to production.

Analysts at Morningstar said the collaboration should strengthen Snowflake's position as a leading data platform within the AWS ecosystem, improving its ability to defend against rivals such as Databricks and Google GOOGL.O BigQuery.

The company currently trades at 85.21 times its estimated earnings for the next 12 months, compared with 12.73 times for Salesforce CRM.N and 47.17 times for MongoDB MDB.O.