Snowflake Inc. (NYSE: SNOW) announced new capabilities at its Snowflake Summit 2026 conference designed to enable organizations to access and govern data across multiple systems without moving or duplicating it.

The company introduced general availability support for Apache Iceberg v3 and Snowflake Storage for Apache Iceberg Tables, which allows teams to work with data inside and outside of Snowflake while reducing data movement. The new framework includes Horizon Catalog capabilities powered by Apache Polaris, providing bi-directional read and write access to Iceberg data managed by Snowflake using external engines.

Christian Kleinerman, executive vice president of product at Snowflake, said the capabilities address data fragmentation that constrains AI innovation. "With Snowflake's capabilities, we are ushering in a new model for enterprise data, where customers can work directly on live, governed data wherever it resides through a single, connected governance plane," Kleinerman stated.

Several organizations are currently using these capabilities. Affirm migrated thousands of tables and financial workloads to Polaris using Snowflake's platform. Indeed reported the interoperable approach reduces data movement while maintaining governance across platforms. NTT DOCOMO and Samsung Ads also cited benefits from accessing data across systems without adding complexity.

The platform now supports external engine access management and the Iceberg REST Scan Plan API to extend governance across open ecosystems. Additional features include Zero-Copy Integrations for platforms like SAP, Salesforce, and Workday, and Auto-gen Agents for Data Shares that convert shared data into conversational AI agents.

Snowflake serves more than 13,900 customers globally and positions itself as a platform for enterprise AI and data management across cloud environments.