Aspire

REDMOND, SEATTLE: Australia can be a credible global force in the artificial intelligence boom by focusing on its strengths in developing applications and operating data centres, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella says.

Nadella, one of the world’s most powerful tech executives, said that China’s low cost artificial intelligence model DeepSeek had opened up the AI race, giving countries outside the US a chance to vie for leadership in aspects of AI technology.

“The biggest lesson of DeepSeek is let us not assume that the last big breakthrough in terms of model architecture has happened,” Nadella told The Australian at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle.

“We should not take too much for granted that whatever is the current AI regime is the only real regime going forward. Whether it’s in Australia or whether it is in any country – even in the global south – quite frankly, I think [anyone] has a shot at being able to innovate, sometimes on top of existing models

Snowflake Inc. is an American cloud-based data storage company. Headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, it operates a platform that allows for data analysis and simultaneous access of data sets with minimal latency. It operates on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. As of November 2024, the company had 10,618 customers, including >800 members of the Forbes Global 2000, and processed 4.2 billion daily queries across its platform.

History

Snowflake Inc. was founded in July 2012 in San Mateo, California, by Benoît Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski. Dageville and Cruanes previously worked as data architects at Oracle Corporation; Żukowski was a co-founder of Vectorwise. Mike Speiser, a venture capitalist at Sutter Hill Ventures, which provided early funding to the company, was the company's first CEO.

In June 2014, Bob Muglia, formerly of Microsoft, was named CEO. In October