Databricks, OpenAI team up with $100M deal to simplify enterprise AI deployment

Databricks Inc. and OpenAI announced today that they have created a multiyear, $100 million partnership, making OpenAI’s latest models, including GPT-5, natively available to the more than 20,000 Databricks customers worldwide.

The deal is meant to simplify the deployment of artificial intelligence agents for enterprises, enabling them to build production-ready AI applications directly on top of their governed data within the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Databricks and Anthropic PBC struck a similar deal in March.

Under the agreement, OpenAI’s models will be tightly integrated with Databricks’ AI development environment, called Agent Bricks. That provides organizations with a single platform to develop, evaluate and scale up AI agents — systems that can perform tasks autonomously with little or no human supervision — without the complexity of moving data or managing separate tools.

Databricks customers will be able to run large language models on their existing enterprise data, accessible via SQL or application programming interface, and deploy them securely at scale with built-in governance and observability controls.

Both companies emphasized that the deal is designed to accelerate enterprise AI adoption by making it easier for enterprises to move from AI experimentation to full-scale production deployments. “Our partnership with Databricks brings our most advanced models to where secure enterprise data already lives, making it easier for businesses to experiment, deploy, and scale AI agents with real impact,” OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap said in a statement.

The companies described the collaboration as a way to bridge two longstanding enterprise challenges: the need for advanced AI capabilities and the strict requirements for data security and accuracy. By keeping data within existing governance frameworks, businesses can deploy AI models while adhering to compliance and performance standards. The partnership also promises high-capacity processing power dedicated to running OpenAI’s models across customer workloads.

Agent Bricks will play a central role in the joint offering. It allows organizations to measure model accuracy with task-specific evaluation methods, fine-tune LLMs for domain-specific tasks and automate workflows across a variety of use cases. With GPT-5 integrated, the companies said businesses can expect faster development cycles and more reliable AI outputs.

Another key component of the partnership is Databricks’ Unity Catalog, which is used for data and AI model governance. It can help data lineage, control access and enforce compliance while scaling AI deployments across departments and geographies, Databricks said. Observability features also help teams monitor performance, accuracy and security.

The partnership builds on an existing collaboration between the two firms. OpenAI already uses Databricks’ infrastructure for processing AI data to improve product performance and was among the first to release its open-weight model, gpt-oss, on Databricks.

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