Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) | SNOW Price Prediction reports Q4 FY26 earnings tonight, and the entire story will come down to a single metric that will tell whether the company’s AI-driven growth is real and building momentum: its remaining performance obligation, or RPO.
If you want to understand Snowflake, you need to understand what RPO actually means. Think of it as a backlog. It’s the total value of future revenue Snowflake has already locked in through signed customer contracts. It’s not what they earned last quarter. It’s what they’re guaranteed to earn going forward. For a company selling enterprise data infrastructure and AI tools, this number is the clearest window into how confident customers are in the platform’s future.
The Number That’s Been Accelerating
Last quarter, Snowflake’s most recent reported results, the RPO figure hit $7.88 billion, up 37% year-over-year. That alone is striking. But what makes it more interesting is the trajectory. In Q1 FY26, RPO was $6.7 billion, growing 34% year-over-year. By Q3, that growth rate had ticked up to 37%. The number isn’t just big. It’s accelerating.
CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy put it plainly on the Q3 call, saying “Snowflake delivered another strong quarter, with product revenue of $1.16 billion, up 29% year-over-year, and remaining performance obligations totaling $7.88 billion, up 37% year-over-year.”
Notice he led with RPO in the same breath as revenue. That’s intentional. Management knows what the market is watching.
Why This Quarter’s RPO Is the Only Number That Matters
Snowflake is in the middle of a major product transition. It’s no longer just a cloud data warehouse. It’s becoming an enterprise AI platform, with products like Snowflake Intelligence, its enterprise AI agent, showing the fastest adoption ramp of anything in its portfolio. The company also recently announced a significant partnership with OpenAI. These bets cost money and take time to convert into revenue.
RPO is how you measure whether those bets are landing. When a large enterprise signs a multi-year Snowflake contract, they’re not just paying for what they need today. They’re committing to what they expect to need tomorrow. A rising RPO, especially one that’s accelerating, means customers are doubling down on Snowflake’s AI roadmap with real dollars attached.
Snowflake’s net revenue retention rate of 125% reinforces this. Existing customers are expanding their spending faster than they’re churning. That’s the engine behind RPO growth.
The stock itself has had a rough stretch. Shares are down roughly 26% year-to-date, trading around $162 heading into tonight.
The Signal Going Forward
The company has beaten expectations for EPS in eight of the last nine quarters. But this time around, analysts and market watchers will focus on whether RPO comes in above $8.5 billion and whether the year-over-year growth rate holds at 37% or improves. A deceleration could raise questions about the pace of AI platform adoption, while acceleration would indicate that enterprise customers are committing to Snowflake’s data and AI infrastructure roadmap through multi-year contracts.
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