Cortex AI Gateway expands to Azure, GCP, and new AWS regions in Snowflake

Cortex AI Gateway has expanded its availability to commercial regions across Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and AWS New Zealand. It provides a centralized, governed access point to manage how AI clients and applications consume models within your account.

Use cases

Imagine your team operates multiple AI applications and coding agents that interact with language models, and you need a single location to attribute spend, control model access, and audit usage. Cortex AI Gateway gives platform teams a unified endpoint to enforce access rules, apply budgets, and log telemetry.

How to use

Snowflake automatically provisions a gateway object named SNOWFLAKE for every account. You do not need to create it manually; you simply manage its privileges and YAML specification.

To list gateways and retrieve the endpoint URL:

SHOW AI GATEWAYS;

What happens in this code:

1. Lists all AI Gateways present in the account.
2. Returns the precise endpoint URL for client applications to connect to.

To grant usage or monitoring privileges to roles:

GRANT USAGE ON AI GATEWAY SNOWFLAKE TO ROLE ai_engineering;
GRANT MONITOR ON AI GATEWAY SNOWFLAKE TO ROLE finops_admin;

What happens in this code:

1. Allows the ai_engineering role to send inference requests through the gateway.
2. Grants the finops_admin role access to query gateway usage metrics and history.

To inspect and edit gateway configuration:

DESCRIBE AI GATEWAY SNOWFLAKE;

ALTER AI GATEWAY SNOWFLAKE FROM SPECIFICATION $$
schema_version: 1
models:
  - name: '*'
logging:
  enabled: true
  capture_payload:
    request_response: false
$$;

What happens in this code:

1. DESCRIBE displays the active YAML specification.
2. ALTER replaces the specification entirely, exposing all available models ('*') and enabling trace logging without storing prompt/response payloads.

Limitations and requirements

• The feature is in Open Public Preview across AWS, Azure, and GCP commercial regions (excluding AWS Europe/Spain).
• Users require USAGE privilege on the gateway to submit inference requests.
• Gateway permissions do not bypass model access controls; users still need permissions to underlying models, such as the SNOWFLAKE.CORTEX_USER database role.
• Updating specifications via ALTER replaces the entire definition rather than patching individual fields.