Databricks has entered into an agreement to acquire Neon, a prominent player in the serverless Postgres space. This strategic move signals Databricks’ commitment to enhancing Neon’s database capabilities and developer experience for both existing and prospective customers and partners.
Transforming Developer Workflows
As artificial intelligence continues to weave itself into the fabric of modern development, the role of AI agents has become increasingly pivotal. Neon is designed specifically to cater to these agent-driven workflows. Recent internal telemetry reveals a striking statistic: over 80 percent of databases provisioned on Neon are automatically created by AI agents, highlighting the rapid growth of agentic workloads. These workloads diverge from traditional human-driven patterns in three significant ways:
- Speed and Flexibility: AI agents operate at machine speed, eliminating the bottlenecks often associated with traditional database provisioning. Neon’s architecture allows for the rapid deployment of fully isolated Postgres instances in 500 milliseconds or less, along with instant branching and forking capabilities for both database schema and data, ensuring that experimental processes do not disrupt production environments.
- Cost Proportionality: The demands of AI agents necessitate a cost structure that scales precisely with usage. Neon’s innovative separation of compute and storage ensures that the total cost of ownership for numerous ephemeral databases aligns closely with the actual queries executed.
- Open Source Ecosystem: AI agents thrive on the rich resources of the Postgres community. Neon is fully compatible with Postgres and seamlessly integrates with popular extensions, making it an ideal choice for developers looking to leverage existing tools.
Databricks and Neon aim to dismantle the conventional constraints of databases that require simultaneous scaling of compute and storage, an inefficiency that can hinder AI workloads. By integrating Neon’s serverless Postgres architecture with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, developers and enterprise teams will be better equipped to build and deploy AI agent systems efficiently.
This collaboration not only addresses potential performance bottlenecks arising from thousands of concurrent agents but also simplifies infrastructure, reduces costs, and accelerates innovation—all while maintaining Databricks’ core principles of security, governance, and scalability.
Following the completion of the acquisition, Neon’s talented team is set to join Databricks, bringing with them a wealth of expertise and continuity for Neon’s thriving community. Together, Databricks and Neon will empower organizations to break down data silos, streamline architecture, and develop AI agents that are more responsive, reliable, and secure.
“The era of AI-native, agent-driven applications is reshaping what a database must do. Neon proves it: four out of every five databases on their platform are spun up by code, not humans. By bringing Neon into Databricks, we’re giving developers a serverless Postgres that can keep up with agentic speed, pay-as-you-go economics, and the openness of the Postgres community.” — Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO at Databricks
“Four years ago, we set out to build the best Postgres for the cloud that was serverless, highly scalable, and open to everyone. With this acquisition, we plan to accelerate that mission with the support and resources of an AI giant. Databricks was founded by open source pioneers committed to making it easier for developers to work with data and AI at any scale. Together, we are starting a new chapter on an even more ambitious journey.” — Nikita Shamgunov, CEO of Neon
