Databricks co-founder and CTO Matei Zaharia has been named the recipient of the 2026 ACM Prize in Computing. A trailblazer in the field of big data, Zaharia was recognized for his exceptional achievements in bridging the gap between academic research and industrial application. The award includes a $250,000 prize, which he plans to donate to charity.
Zaharia’s career began during his doctoral studies at UC Berkeley. Under the guidance of his advisor, Ion Stoica, he developed the open-source project Apache Spark. By dramatically increasing the efficiency of big data processing, the technology fundamentally reshaped the software industry. Zaharia later transitioned to the private sector, integrating Spark into the Databricks platform and helping it grow into a cloud data storage giant valued at $134 billion.
Redefining the Boundaries of AGI
Despite his monumental success in data processing, Zaharia’s focus has shifted entirely toward artificial intelligence. Addressing the hottest topic in Silicon Valley—Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—he offers a perspective that diverges from the mainstream, arguing that AGI is not a distant vision, but a current reality.
“AGI is actually already here; it’s just that its form hasn’t been fully grasped by the public yet,” Zaharia said in an interview. He pointed out that the industry’s obsession with measuring AI models against human standards is a fundamental misconception.
Zaharia believes that with the ongoing evolution of AI agents and data infrastructure, artificial intelligence already possesses the core capabilities required to solve complex tasks. He advocates for the industry to move beyond the framework of human intelligence and instead evaluate these models based on their practical efficacy in specific domains, rather than fixating on whether they possess “human-like” thought processes.
As an associate professor at UC Berkeley, Zaharia is currently dedicated to applying AI technology more deeply to scientific research. As Databricks continues to scale—with its annual revenue run rate now reaching $5.4 billion—Zaharia is leveraging the platform to provide the foundational computing power and data support necessary for large-scale AI training.