NEW YORK, February 23, 2026, 16:54 ET — After-hours
- Snowflake shares lost 8.6% Monday, holding close to $158 in after-hours trading.
- Cortex dropped its Code CLI expansion, plus introduced a monthly subscription option beyond its main consumption setup.
- Another analyst trimmed their target, fueling the pre-earnings churn just before Wednesday’s results.
Snowflake Inc. shares dropped 8.6% to $157.60 on Monday, then hovered around that mark after hours. Investors pulled back from software names ahead of the company’s quarterly results set for later this week. The stock traded between $155.40 and $175.55 during the session.
This isn’t an easy stretch for bullish investors. Snowflake is set to announce earnings Wednesday, with the share price dropping as talk heats up about corporate budgets moving away from standard software and toward rapid-fire AI initiatives.
Snowflake feels the impact of this shift acutely, since its revenue mainly tracks with customer usage, not seat count. Any dip in activity shows up fast in the numbers. Guidance stings more than a simple earnings miss.
Broader market weakness was no help. Monday saw U.S. stocks drop sharply, with software names taking the brunt as traders tried to size up trade policy worries and the expense — plus the shakeup — from new AI tools. “The question about AI is twofold: How much is it going to cost, and who all is going to be disrupted?” said Tom Hainlin, national investment strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management. (Reuters)
Earlier, Snowflake attempted a pivot with its messaging. The company rolled out news that its Cortex Code CLI—a command-line interface tool designed for developers to interact with Snowflake via text prompts—is now extending its reach: it’ll support both dbt and Apache Airflow, not just Snowflake-native workflows. There’s also a new self-service monthly subscription, which doesn’t require Snowflake compute or consumption to use. “Developers don’t operate in a single system, and AI coding assistants shouldn’t either,” EVP of Product Christian Kleinerman said. (Barchart.com)
BTIG’s Gray Powell kept his buy call on Snowflake but slashed his target price down to $235 from $312, describing the situation as “complicated” going into the report. Powell’s channel checks point to revenue growth sticking near 25%, though he notes some investors are still looking for something closer to 30%. (Benzinga)
All eyes are on the outlook now. Zacks puts consensus earnings at 27 cents per share, revenue pegged near $1.25 billion. But the quarter itself isn’t really the story—what’s next is what matters. Product revenue draws the sharpest focus, since it reflects customer usage patterns. Remaining performance obligations, the contracted backlog figure, gets close scrutiny from traders, too. (Finviz)
Competition is always lurking. Snowflake faces off with Databricks, plus the major cloud providers—Amazon, Microsoft, Google—all battling for data and AI workloads. If pricing or performance changes, customers have other places to go.
The bear scenario? Simple enough. If guidance turns cautious, usage looks soft, or customers start delaying projects, the stock could stay under pressure. Software valuations are already jittery, and AI headlines keep sparking sharp moves in the market.
Snowflake will report its earnings after the U.S. market shuts on Wednesday, Feb. 25. The company’s conference call is set for 3 p.m. Mountain Time, which lines up with 5 p.m. ET. (businesswire.com)
