The PyTorch Foundation, a community-driven hub supporting the open source PyTorch framework and a broader portfolio of innovative open source AI projects, is announcing today that Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, has upgraded its membership to become a premier member.
Snowflake is the platform for the AI era, making it easy for enterprises to innovate faster and get more value from data. More than 12,000 customers around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest companies, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to build, use, and share data, apps, and AI. With Snowflake, data and AI are transformative for everyone.
Led by Snowflake’s Vice President of AI Engineering and Research, Dwarak Rajagopal, the Snowflake AI Research Team delivers practical, real-world AI research that helps solve critical enterprise challenges. The AI Research Team’s focus is to build AI that works, not just in theory, but in the complex, dynamic environments of Snowflake’s customers. They are also committed to advancing open source AI and making their cutting-edge research accessible and impactful for the wider community.
“PyTorch plays a critical role in our research on the Snowflake AI Research Team, bridging the gap between open innovation and enterprise AI. By contributing optimizations for training and inference back to the open source ecosystem, we’re helping advance the AI industry while enabling our customers to benefit from the latest breakthroughs in a secure, trusted environment,” said Dwarak Rajagopal, Vice President of AI Engineering and Research, Snowflake. “Joining the PyTorch Foundation board is an opportunity to deepen that commitment and help shape the future of AI alongside the wider community.”
PyTorch is a key part of the Snowflake AI Research Team’s work, supporting everything from inference to training optimizations. The Snowflake AI Research Team built open source tools like Arctic Inference, a vLLM plugin that offers a suite of state of the art inference optimizations, and Arctic Training, a framework that extends DeepSpeed to simplify and speed up post-training foundational models. PyTorch not only acts as a connector between the Snowflake AI Research Team and the open source community, but it enables the Team’s research to be directly integrated into Snowflake’s products — giving enterprises immediate access to cutting-edge research in a secure, trusted environment.
Snowflake is committed to helping customers accelerate PyTorch processing to meet the scalability needs of their deep learning use cases through the Container Runtime, a prebuilt environment large-scale model development that includes APIs for distributed training with PyTorch. To help customers speed up the path to production machine learning, Snowflake is continuing to invest heavily in optimizations that allow businesses to easily and efficiently run large-scale deep learning workloads directly where their data lives.
“Snowflake’s deep investment in open source and scalable AI infrastructure makes them an invaluable partner to the PyTorch community,” said Matt White, Executive Director, PyTorch Foundation. “Snowflake’s decision to upgrade to our highest level of membership signals a shared commitment to driving innovation in AI responsibly and collaboratively, and we’re thrilled to welcome them to the PyTorch Foundation as a premier member.”
As a premier member, Snowflake is granted one seat to the PyTorch Foundation Governing Board. The Board sets policy through our bylaws, mission and vision statements, describing the overarching scope of foundation initiatives, technical vision, and direction.
We’re happy to welcome Dwarak Rajagopal, Vice President of AI Engineering and Research at Snowflake to the PyTorch Foundation Board. Dwarak Rajagopal is a distinguished technology leader with over two decades of experience at some of the world’s most innovative companies, including Google, Meta, Uber, Apple, and AMD. As Vice President of AI Engineering and Research at Snowflake, Dwarak oversees the AI and ML engineering organizations, helping drive innovation across Snowflake Cortex AI, the Snowflake AI Research Team, and open source offerings. Dwarak is passionate about democratizing AI through open source initiatives and ensuring the ethical advancement of technology. His visionary leadership continues to shape the future of AI and empower global innovation.
To learn more about how your organization can join the PyTorch Foundation, visit our website.
About PyTorch Foundation
The PyTorch Foundation is a community-driven hub supporting the open source PyTorch framework and a broader portfolio of innovative open source AI projects. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the PyTorch Foundation provides a vendor-neutral, trusted home for collaboration across the AI lifecycle—from model training and inference, to domain-specific applications. Through open governance, strategic support, and a global contributor community, the PyTorch Foundation empowers developers, researchers, and enterprises to build and deploy responsible AI at scale. Learn more at https://pytorch.org/foundation.