Wells Fargo raised its price target on Snowflake to $500 from $320 on Wednesday, marking the highest target on the stock among major Wall Street firms, according to data from LSEG. The bank reiterated its overweight rating in a note tied to the company's artificial intelligence positioning, and the new target implies almost 85% upside from Tuesday's closing price.
Analyst Ryan MacWilliams argued that artificial intelligence is now accelerating the next phase of Snowflake's growth rather than threatening to disrupt its core data warehousing and analytics business, a reversal of an earlier bearish narrative that weighed heavily on the stock earlier this year. That narrative had centered on fears that AI coding assistants and large language models could erode demand for traditional software-as-a-service platforms, concerns that at one point pushed Snowflake shares down more than 44% from their highs.
Snowflake shares have since recovered and are now up more than 20% for the year, aided by a string of price target increases from other major banks. Firms including UBS, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs have each raised their targets into a range roughly between $270 and $370 in recent months, citing stronger-than-expected demand for AI-linked products such as Cortex Code and Snowflake Intelligence. Wells Fargo's new $500 target sits meaningfully above that cluster, reflecting a more aggressive view of how quickly AI workloads can translate into incremental revenue for the company.
The bullish case rests on Snowflake's ability to capture a larger share of enterprise AI spending as companies look to run more of their machine learning and inference workloads directly on top of the data they already store in Snowflake's platform. Investor-day commentary earlier this year highlighted growing traction for tools that let both technical and non-technical users query and act on enterprise data through natural language, an expansion of the company's addressable market beyond its traditional data warehousing customer base.
Not every analyst shares the same enthusiasm. Some firms, including Bernstein and Barclays, have maintained more neutral stances on the stock, acknowledging solid quarterly results and AI traction while cautioning that valuation remains a sensitivity point and that any re-rating higher is likely to be gradual rather than immediate. Others earlier in the year had cut targets or flagged concerns about competitive pressure from large language model providers building their own data infrastructure capabilities.
The upgrade lands during a week when investors are broadly reassessing AI-linked spending across the technology sector, following a selloff in chip stocks and ahead of earnings from Microsoft and Meta Platforms. A software company like Snowflake, which sells tools built on top of AI infrastructure rather than the infrastructure itself, may benefit if investor sentiment continues rotating away from capital-intensive AI infrastructure plays and toward companies seen as direct beneficiaries of AI adoption without matching spending burdens.