Databricks Inks Deal With Google to Host Gemini Models

Databricks will soon host Google’s Gemini models as part of an expansion of a four-year-old strategic partnership between the companies that will be announced later today, Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, said in an exclusive interview at the company’s customer conference.

The addition of Gemini models, which comes three months after Databricks unveiled a similar agreement with Anthropic to host its Claude models, is part of Databricks’ strategy to help customers build AI applications and agents using the data they store on its service. Examples include agents that scour through technical manuals to answer questions and ones that help financial firms ensure that they’re following laws and regulations, among other tasks.

Databricks believes that offering a wide selection of models is important for building agents, because some customers want powerful models with advanced reasoning features for tasks like coding while others are more focused on cost, according to Ghodsi. “Right now, depending on which cloud you’ve picked, you’ve kind of picked your model too,” he said “We want to break that, because we’re a multi-cloud company and we want to make all the models available.”

Another advantage of these partnerships, and others Databricks has struck with Meta and Mistral, is that customers can avoid the manual work involved in setting up and purchasing models from third-party providers, Ghodsi said.

Partnerships with model providers are one way that Databricks and Snowflake, one of its chief rivals, are vying for AI business. Snowflake earlier this year inked an agreement with Microsoft to provide customers access to OpenAI models through its Azure cloud service. Snowflake has also recently talked with Google about an agreement to host Gemini models, as we reported in March, but the status of those talks isn’t clear.