This is one hypothetical way they could capture this value:

1) Building a common platform to upload datasets by anyone. e.g. weather data, retail data, govt data, other open data, or close data (copyright etc). They gave the example of COVID cases in their S-1 doc.

2) Providing mechanism for others to find data through a marketplace; some data is free, other only via payment (with diff monetisation models, e.g. per consumption, per month). Allow other customers to consume it as & when needed. Note, based on their S-1 doc, data is never copied when shared with others, so cost is limited to share with a wide audience.

3) More data on the platform, more data is shareable in the 'marketplace' and more data used by everyone. This increases the value of the whole platform through network effects.

4) Also opens up alternative revenue streams. e.g. more revenue through storage (more data on platform from different people). and revenue from shared data that is consumed (maybe)

Here is a company that is doing something similar in Australia. https://www.datarepublic.com/solutions/use-cases/data-collab...

I'm a little skeptical of this as well, but I think there is a path. At my previous company we would take in a lot of data from other companies and do analysis for them. If we had a really easy way to share the transformed and analyzed data after it's been modelled in the warehouse, that really would have been great. The question is, are you going to get companies to create a snowflake account just so they can access data in this way? Maybe if it's easy to export / do further analysis.