Databricks, the Data and AI company, has announced its intent to acquire Neon, a serverless Postgres company.
As the $100-billion-plus database market braces for unprecedented disruption driven by AI, Databricks plans to continue innovating and investing in Neon’s database and developer experience for existing and new Neon customers and partners.
AI agents are becoming increasingly integral components for modern developers, and Neon is built to support their agentic workflows.
Recent internal telemetry showed that over 80% of the databases provisioned on Neon were created automatically by AI agents rather than by humans, underscoring how agentic workloads are growing.
These workloads differ from human-driven patterns in three ways:
- Speed + Flexibility: Neon can spin up a fully isolated Postgres instance in 500 milliseconds or less and supports instant branching and forking of not only the database schema but also data.
- Cost Proportionality: Neon’s full separation of compute and storage keeps the total cost of ownership for thousands of ephemeral databases proportional to the queries they actually run.
- Open Source Ecosystem: Neon is Postgres-compatible and works out of the box with popular extensions.
“The era of AI-native, agent-driven applications is reshaping what a database must do,” said Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO at Databricks. “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.”
Together, Databricks and Neon will work to remove the traditional limitations of databases that require compute and storage to scale in tandem. The integration of Neon’s Postgres architecture with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform will help developers and enterprise teams build and deploy AI agent systems.
This approach not only prevents performance bottlenecks from thousands of concurrent agents but also simplifies infrastructure, reduces costs and accelerates innovation — all with Databricks’ security, governance and scalability.
“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,” said Nikita Shamgunov, CEO of Neon.
“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.”
Together, Neon and Databricks will help organisations to eliminate data silos, simplify architecture and build AI agents that are more responsive, reliable and secure.
