Databricks Buys Electric: AI Agents Get Dedicated Postgres

Databricks has acquired Electric, the company behind PGlite and the Electric sync engine. This move aims to give every AI agent its own Postgres database. The Electric team will join Neon, a serverless Postgres company Databricks acquired last year. PGlite is a complete Postgres database that runs in WebAssembly. It has seen its weekly downloads grow from 1 million to 13 million over the past year. What's key here is Electric's sync engine. It keeps a central Postgres database synced in near real-time with browser tabs, mobile apps, or agents. This is like the multiplayer model of applications such as Figma, but applied to databases. Electric’s founders state that everything previously open-sourced will remain open-source. However, Electric’s hosted service, Electric Cloud, is winding down. This acquisition continues Databricks' string of database acquisitions. The company notes that AI agents now create approximately four times more databases than human users on Lakebase. For some applications, the average database compute is alive for under 10 seconds. This shows how AI agents are changing how databases are used.