Databricks sales growth tops 80%, but margin are shrinking from swarm of AI agents

Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, speaks at the company's Data and AI Summit in San Francisco on June 16, 2026. Grant Terzakis Media | Databricks Databricks has a unique role in the AI boom. Revenue continues to soar as businesses swarm to the company's data analytics tools. But as clients rely on more AI agents to clean up data and ask questions, Databricks is enduring higher costs, leading to lower margins. "It's the consumption-based business model, agentic AI coming," Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told CNBC in an interview on Tuesday at the company's Data and AI Summit in San Francisco. "The agents are generating way more queries. We have all these agents, the agents and agent platform we have also generates revenue, so it just increases the consumption of everything all around." Databricks told analysts at the conference that annualized revenue jumped over 80% from a year earlier and now sits at $6.9 billion, up from a figure of $5.4 billion in the fiscal fourth quarter . With a private market valuation of $134 billion, Databricks is worth more than rival Snowflake , which went public in 2020 and now has a market cap of about $83 billion. Snowflake's annualized revenue is around $5.6 billion, based on its latest quarterly results published last month. Databricks continues to sit on the sidelines of the public market even as its fellow highly valued peers line up for IPOs. …