Snowflake Surges 20% on Earnings Beat as AI Compute Futures, OpenAI IPO Math and C3.ai Guidance Miss Round Out a Pivotal AI Market Day

Snowflake led the day's AI market action, with shares jumping as much as 20% in pre-market trading on Thursday after the company reported fiscal second-quarter 2027 results that well exceeded expectations. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.62, beating the analyst consensus of $0.45 by $0.17, while revenue hit $1.55 billion, topping the $1.48 billion estimate and representing 35% year-over-year growth. Analysts described the results as evidence of an enterprise AI adoption flywheel gaining speed across Snowflake's cloud data platform business.

C3.ai offered a more mixed picture, posting a fiscal first-quarter 2027 double beat in revenue and earnings but then guiding below analyst estimates for the current period, sending its stock in the opposite direction from Snowflake. Total revenue for the quarter reached $52.4 million, with subscription revenue of $49.2 million accounting for 94% of that figure. The below-consensus forward guidance overshadowed the in-quarter performance.

In derivatives markets, Nodal Exchange Holdings announced plans to launch futures contracts on AI computing power, positioning itself to compete directly with CME Group, which has already announced two Compute futures contracts set to launch on October 5, 2026, pending regulatory review. The entry of Nodal, which already operates electricity futures across hundreds of North American locations, signals a broadening race to create financial instruments that allow companies to hedge the cost of AI chip capacity.

Broader structural questions about AI economics continued to gain traction, with a MarketWatch analysis arguing that the math underlying cloud AI rental is breaking down and that buying AI hardware outright is becoming more economical than renting compute capacity from major cloud providers at sustained utilization rates above roughly 70%. That dynamic is being seen as a potential power shift within Big Tech, threatening the cloud revenue models of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. On the IPO front, a Seeking Alpha analysis flagged the valuation challenge facing both OpenAI and Anthropic, noting that Anthropic's $2 trillion implied valuation would require tens of billions of dollars in annual profit to justify, a bar the company is far from clearing despite confidentially filing for an IPO in June.