Tech

Snowflake shares tumble 10% a day after IPO surge

Key Points
  • Shares of Snowflake fell 10.39% Thursday, a day after the company's blockbuster market debut.
  • The cloud company had closed Wednesday up more than 111%, reaching a $70.4 billion valuation at the end of trading.
  • Its market cap is now about $63 billion.
A view of the Snowflake IPO banner on the front of the New York Stock Exchange as employees of the tech company celebrate the largest tech IPO in exchange history, Sept. 16, 2020.
Kostas Lymperopoulos | CSM | AP

Shares of Snowflake closed down 10.39% Thursday, a day after the cloud company's blockbuster market debut

It's a sharp drop from Wednesday's close, when shares were up more than 111%, giving Snowflake a $70.4 billion market capitalization. The company's market cap dropped to $63.1 billion at Thursday's market close. 

The slide came amid a broader decline among tech stocks.

"A stock is worth exactly what somebody wants to pay for it," CEO Frank Slootman told CNBC just after the shares began trading Wednesday. "It's like talking about the weather — it is what it is. Tomorrow's another day, we'll see what it brings."

Snowflake raised more $3 billion based on its opening price, the most ever for a software company. The stock trades under the symbol SNOW.

Silicon Valley is debating the right way to go public after Snowflake's monster IPO
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Silicon Valley is debating the right way to go public after Snowflake's monster IPO

Snowflake is growing alongside the major public cloud vendors by providing technology that allows clients, including McKesson and DoorDash, to quickly analyze and share vast amounts of data and increase capacity as needed, rather than relying on databases that are tied to hardware. 

However, the company faces a risk in its relationship with Amazon: It relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run a large part of its infrastructure, and has committed to spending $1.2 billion on technology from AWS over the next five years. At the same time, AWS has a competing service, Redshift, in which it's been investing heavily for the last few years.

-- CNBC's Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

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