Amazon has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind DuckDB, an increasingly popular open-source analytical database. The deal will bring the DuckLabs team, including DuckDB creators Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, into Amazon Web Services (AWS), although the DuckDB open-source project itself will not be acquired by Amazon.
The transaction is expected to close in early September 2026, subject to customary closing conditions. Financial terms have not been disclosed. DuckLabs says its team of more than 30 employees will remain based in Amsterdam and continue working on DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack and the broader DuckDB ecosystem. The projects will remain free and open source under their existing MIT licenses, with the independent DuckDB Foundation continuing to oversee them.
Amazon Targets A Bigger Role In Cloud Analytics
The acquisition gives AWS access to the engineering team responsible for one of the fastest-growing analytical database technologies in the open-source ecosystem. DuckDB is designed to run inside applications rather than requiring a separate database server, allowing developers and data teams to perform analytical SQL queries with relatively little infrastructure.
AWS said DuckDB is particularly well suited to everyday analytical workloads involving datasets of up to about 1 terabyte. Its in-process architecture and vectorized execution allow applications to query data directly from formats such as Parquet, CSV and JSON, including files stored in Amazon S3.
This fits closely with AWS’s broader effort to make S3 more than a storage destination. The company increasingly wants customers to analyze data where it is stored rather than repeatedly moving information into dedicated data warehouses or analytics clusters.
DuckDB And AWS: Key Numbers
| Metric | Latest Figure / Detail |
|---|---|
| DuckLabs employees | 30+ |
| DuckDB downloads | More than 3 million per day |
| DuckDB license | MIT |
| DuckLabs headquarters | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| DuckDB creators | Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt |
| DuckLabs founded | More than 5 years ago |
| Expected AWS transaction timing | Early September 2026 |
| Acquisition price | Not disclosed |
| DuckDB Foundation | Remains independent |
| Related open-source projects | DuckLake, Quack and others |
DuckLabs said DuckDB now records more than three million downloads each day, illustrating the scale the project has reached since beginning as a research effort. The company itself has grown to more than 30 employees while remaining bootstrapped and owned by its founders and development team.
Why DuckDB Matters To AWS
DuckDB occupies a different position from traditional cloud database services. Instead of requiring users to provision and maintain a database server, it can operate as an embedded analytical engine inside another application.
That model has become increasingly attractive as developers work with data stored in cloud object storage. Rather than transferring files into a separate database before running an analysis, users can query formats such as Parquet directly.
AWS says it has already been using DuckDB internally. Amazon Quick, for example, incorporated DuckDB integrations and optimizations into its dashboarding engine. Since Quick launched in October 2025, AWS says the service has processed more than 2.5 billion queries using its custom query engine with DuckDB integrations and optimizations.
AWS also said those integrations helped Amazon Quick reduce average query latency by 30%.
Amazon Quick And DuckDB
| Amazon Quick Metric | Reported Result |
|---|---|
| Launch | October 2025 |
| Queries processed | 2.5 billion+ |
| Average query latency improvement | 30% |
| DuckDB role | Query engine integration and optimization |
| Data environment | AWS data services, including S3 Tables |
The numbers provide an indication of why AWS sees strategic value in DuckDB beyond simply acquiring a software company. The technology has already been tested within AWS products, potentially reducing the technical and commercial risk of deeper integration.
DuckDB Will Remain Open Source
One of the most important aspects of the transaction is what Amazon is not acquiring.
AWS has explicitly said it is acquiring DuckLabs and its employees rather than taking ownership of the DuckDB open-source project. DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack and other open-source components will continue under the MIT license and remain under the stewardship of the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation.
DuckLabs has also said it plans to expand the role of the Foundation by creating a technical advisory board through which community members and commercial users can provide input into the project’s direction.
The company also plans to make the extension ecosystem more open by enabling extensions signed by other developers and organizations to run in DuckDB.
What Changes And What Does Not
| Area | Before Acquisition | After Acquisition |
|---|---|---|
| DuckDB license | MIT | MIT |
| Open-source status | Open source | Remains open source |
| DuckDB Foundation | Independent nonprofit | Continues stewardship |
| Core development team | DuckLabs | Joins AWS |
| Team location | Amsterdam | Amsterdam |
| DuckLake | Open source | Remains open source |
| Quack | Open source | Remains open source |
| AWS integration | Existing collaboration | Expected to deepen |
| Acquisition price | N/A | Not disclosed |
For developers, the immediate message from AWS and DuckLabs is that existing DuckDB users should not experience a licensing change. AWS has said that “nothing changes for DuckDB users” while the transaction remains subject to closing conditions.
AWS And DuckLabs Already Had A Working Relationship
The acquisition does not represent a completely new relationship between the two organizations. AWS and DuckLabs have been collaborating for more than a year, including work involving Amazon S3 Tables and Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse.
That existing cooperation gives AWS a direct understanding of where DuckDB can fit into its broader analytics portfolio.
The combination could potentially strengthen integration between DuckDB and services including Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Athena, EMR, Glue and SageMaker. AWS has described the broader objective as combining DuckDB’s performance on everyday analytical workloads with the large-scale capabilities of its cloud infrastructure.
From Data Lakes To AI Agents
AWS is also positioning DuckDB as relevant to the emerging AI-agent ecosystem.
AI agents frequently perform exploratory data analysis. They may issue multiple queries, inspect subsets of information, test hypotheses and progressively narrow down what they need. DuckDB’s ability to run fast analytical queries without requiring a separately managed database could make it useful for those workflows.
This creates a potential bridge between traditional analytics and AI-driven data interaction.
Instead of every analytical request requiring a large warehouse or cluster, some workloads could be handled closer to the data through embedded query engines. That could lower infrastructure requirements for smaller or exploratory workloads while complementing larger-scale systems.
Implications For The Cloud Data Market
The acquisition comes as cloud data architecture is shifting toward open formats and object storage. Companies increasingly store data in formats such as Parquet and use table formats and query engines to analyze that information without locking every workload into a single proprietary database.
DuckDB’s popularity reflects this change.
For AWS, owning the team behind DuckDB could provide an opportunity to influence how applications interact with data stored in S3. It could also strengthen AWS’s position against competing analytics platforms from companies such as Databricks and Snowflake.
At the same time, AWS has an unusual challenge: DuckDB’s appeal comes partly from being open, portable and independent of a particular cloud provider.
Maintaining that openness could therefore be important to preserving the project’s developer trust.
The Bigger Picture
Amazon’s DuckLabs acquisition is less about buying another conventional database product and more about securing expertise around a changing model of data analytics. DuckDB represents a lightweight approach in which analytical processing can happen directly inside applications and against files in cloud storage. AWS already has enormous scale in storage and analytics, so deeper DuckDB integration could help connect those capabilities with the growing number of developers who prefer simple, embedded data tools.
The transaction also highlights the strategic importance of open-source infrastructure in the cloud market. AWS is acquiring the company and engineering team while allowing the open-source project to remain under an independent foundation and MIT license. If that structure succeeds, AWS could gain deeper technical integration and developer reach without immediately removing the portability that helped DuckDB become popular.
Looking Ahead
The immediate focus will be on completing the transaction and integrating the more than 30-person DuckLabs team into AWS. Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt are expected to continue leading the team and guiding DuckDB’s technical direction. AWS is also expected to explore deeper integrations between DuckDB and its data services, potentially expanding the technology’s role in S3-based analytics, serverless workloads and AI-related data processing.
For developers and enterprises, the most important factor will be whether DuckDB can maintain its open-source character while benefiting from AWS’s infrastructure and resources. The MIT license and continued role of the DuckDB Foundation provide important safeguards, but the project’s long-term direction will remain closely watched as AWS increases its involvement. If the partnership delivers stronger performance, broader integrations and continued community participation, the acquisition could accelerate DuckDB’s expansion from a popular analytical engine into a more significant component of modern cloud data architecture.
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