Databricks has announced its intent to acquire Neon, a serverless Postgres company, as the database market prepares for AI-driven disruption. Databricks aims to continue innovating in Neon's database and developer experience for existing and new customers. Neon's open, serverless foundation is designed to support AI agents, with over 80% of Neon databases provisioned automatically by AI agents, highlighting the rapid growth of agentic workloads.

These agentic workloads differ from human-driven patterns due to speed, flexibility, and cost proportionality. Neon can spin up a fully isolated Postgres instance in 500 milliseconds or less and supports instant branching and forking of database schema and data. Neon's architecture keeps costs proportional to usage by fully separating compute and storage. It is also 100 percent Postgres-compatible, leveraging the open-source ecosystem.

Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO at Databricks, stated that AI-native, agent-driven applications are reshaping database requirements. He noted that most databases on Neon's platform are spun up by code, not humans. The acquisition will provide developers with a serverless Postgres solution capable of handling agentic speed and pay-as-you-go economics, while maintaining the openness of the Postgres community.

Databricks and Neon aim to remove traditional database limitations that require compute and storage to scale together, which hinders AI workloads. Integrating Neon's serverless Postgres architecture with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform will help developers build and deploy AI agent systems efficiently. This approach prevents performance bottlenecks, simplifies infrastructure, reduces costs, and accelerates innovation, all with Databricks' security, governance, and scalability.

Nikita Shamgunov, CEO of Neon, said that the acquisition will accelerate Neon's mission to build the best serverless, scalable, and open Postgres for the cloud. The Neon team is expected to join Databricks, bringing expertise and continuity for Neon's community. Together, they aim to empower organizations to eliminate data silos, simplify architecture, and build responsive, reliable, and secure AI agents. More details are planned to be shared at the Data + AI Summit in San Francisco from June 9–12.

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including required regulatory clearances. Neon, founded in 2021, focuses on building a serverless Postgres platform for developers to create reliable and scalable applications. Databricks, the Data and AI company, supports over 10,000 organizations worldwide with its Data Intelligence Platform and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, and MLflow.