Databricks co-founder wins prestigious ACM award, says ‘AGI is here already’

Databricks co-founder and CTO Matei Zaharia almost missed the email telling him that he was the 2026 recipient of the ACM Prize in Computing. “Yeah, it was a surprise,” he told TechCrunch.

Back in 2009, the tech Zaharia developed for his PhD at UC Berkeley, under the tutelage of famed professor Ion Stoica, was launched into Databricks.