Databricks co-founder wins prestigious ACM award, says ‘AGI is here already’

Databricks co-founder and CTO Matei Zaharia won the 2026 ACM Prize in Computing.

The award includes a $250,000 cash prize that Zaharia said he will donate to charity.

He developed the technology behind the open-source project Spark during his 2009 PhD at UC Berkeley.

Zaharia told TechCrunch 'AGI is here already' and warned about security risks in AI agents like OpenClaw.