Databricks and Microsoft expand Azure partnership into the 2030s
Databricks Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today said they’re extending their strategic partnership into the 2030s as the companies seek business from enterprises building artificial intelligence applications grounded in proprietary data and business context.
Under the expanded agreement, Databricks will increase its use of Microsoft Azure to operate its own business. The company plans to run core operations and analytics on Azure Databricks while building its unified data lakehouse on the platform.
Databricks will also expand its use of Azure Cobalt, Microsoft’s Arm-based computing infrastructure, for data-intensive and agentic AI workloads. Databricks currently uses Cobalt 100 processors and plans to adopt Cobalt 200, which Microsoft says delivers up to 50% better performance and provides memory encryption by default.
Microsoft, in turn, said it will continue integrating Databricks’ data and AI technology across products that include Microsoft 365, Teams, Copilot, Power BI, OneLake, Purview and Microsoft Foundry.
