Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says company will be worth $1 trillion by doing these three things

The first is to enter the transactional database market, the traditional territory for large enterprise players like Oracle, which Ghodsi said has remained largely “unchanged for 40 years.” Earlier this year, Databricks launched a correlation-based offering called Lakehouse, which aims to combine the capabilities of traditional databases with modern data lake storage, in an attempt to capture some of this market.

The company is also seeing growth driven by the emergence of AI-powered programming. “More than 80% of the databases launched on Databricks are not launched by humans, but by AI agents,” Ghodsi said. As developers use AI tools to “code live” — that is, build programs quickly using natural language commands — these applications automatically need databases, and by default they rely on the Databricks platform.

“That’s just a huge growth factor for us. And I think if we did that, we could probably get to $1 trillion,” he said.

The second growth area is Agentbricks, Databricks’ platform for building AI agents that work with an enterprise’s own data.

“It’s a commodity now to have AI that has general knowledge, but it’s very difficult to get AI that actually works and understands that private data that’s inside an organization,” Ghodsi said. He pointed to the Royal Bank of Canada, which created artificial intelligence agents for equity research analysts, as an example. These agents were able to automatically collect earnings calls and company information to compile research reports, reducing “several days’ worth of work to minutes,” Ghodsi said.

Finally, the third piece of Qudsi’s puzzle involves building applications on top of this infrastructure, where developers use AI tools to quickly build applications that run on the Lakehouse and are then run by AI agents. “To get the triple, you also have to have applications on top of all of that,” Ghodsi said. “Now you have applications that are encrypted with the database, with the Lakehouse, with the proxies.” “These are three new vectors for us.”

Qudsi did not provide a time frame for achieving the $1 trillion goal. Currently, only a few companies have been able to achieve this feat, and they are all publicly traded companies. In the technology industry, only major technology giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have managed to cross the $1 trillion threshold.

Reaching that level would require Databricks, which is widely expected to go public sometime in early 2026, to increase its valuation nearly seven-fold from its current reported level. Part of that journey will also likely include the expected IPO, Ghodsi said.

“There are huge advantages, pros and cons. That’s why we’re not very religious about it,” Qudsi said when asked about a potential IPO. “We’ll go public at some point. But for us, it’s not really a big deal.”

Could the company offer its shares for an IPO next year? Maybe, Qudsi answered.