Who pays for compute when a consumer uses a reader account to access shared data?

• A. The consumer
• B. The provider
• C. The cloud provider
• D. The data owner

Answer: (B)

Compute costs for shared data accessed through a reader account are billed to the data provider. The provider creates and manages the reader account to allow external access, and when the consumer runs queries, the compute resources used are part of the provider’s Snowflake environment and billed to the provider. The consumer’s access does not incur separate compute charges in this setup, even though they can view the shared data. The data owner is the data source, but billing for the reader account’s compute belongs to the provider, not the data owner or the cloud provider.