"The shares of cloud-native data warehouse specialist Snowflake have seen a significant decline in 2024 due to missed earnings estimates and a major data breach. However, there are several reasons why investors should still consider buying this stock for the long term. Firstly, Snowflake has shown healthy financials with impressive top-line growth rates in previous years. While the projected growth rates for fiscal 2025 are lower, this is expected as the company's revenues stabilize. Despite the drop in gross margin and adjusted operating margin, Snowflake's investments in AI initiatives can unlock new revenue opportunities in the future. The company also has a strong backlog of business commitments and reported a healthy non-GAAP free-cash-flow margin in the first quarter. Secondly, Snowflake has robust AI initiatives that position it well to benefit from the ongoing AI revolution.

Its Cortex AI platform has already been adopted by a large number of customers and its large language model, Arctic, has proven to be superior in benchmarks. Snowflake aims to leverage these AI technologies to bridge structured and unstructured data in its enterprise data management platform. Lastly, Snowflake is expanding its total addressable market by advancing its capabilities. The upcoming support for the Apache Iceberg data storage format will allow Snowflake to handle larger data footprints and win new use cases. Additionally, the general availability of Hybrid Tables will enable the company to run transactional workloads on top of Snowflake data. Considering these factors, Snowflake's current valuation, and analyst projections for future revenue growth, the stock appears to be a smart long-term investment. Despite recent setbacks, there is potential for significant share price growth over the next decade. "