Databricks co-founder and CTO Matei Zaharia almost missed the email telling him that he was the 2026 recipient of the ACM Prize in Computing. “Yeah, it was a surprise,” he told TechCrunch.

Back in 2009, the tech Zaharia developed for his PhD at UC Berkeley, under the tutelage of famed professor Ion Stoica, was launched into Databricks.

Zaharia had created a way to dramatically speed the results of slow, clunky, big data projects and released it as an open source project called Spark. Big data was in those days what AI is today and Spark turned the tech industry on its ear. The 28-year-old Zaharia became a tech celeb.

Since then, he has helmed the engineering at Databricks, growing it into a cloud storage giant and now a data foundation for AI and agents. Along the way the company has raised over $20 billion — valuing it at $134 billion — and hit $5.4 billion in revenue run rate. The Silicon Valley dream.

On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery issued him the award for his collective contributions. The award comes with a $250,000 cash prize that he is donating to an as-yet-to-be-determined charity.

Zaharia, who in addition to his CTO duties is also an associate professor at UC Berkeley, is looking forward, not back. Like everyone else in the Valley, the future he sees is filled with AI.