Amazon announced the acquisition of DuckLabs, the company founded by the creators of DuckDB, an embedded analytical database designed for fast queries on datasets up to one terabyte. In an announcement on their blog, Mühleisen and Raasveldt said that joining AWS gives them "the resources and reach to bring this technology to many more developers and organizations, and to pursue ideas at a scale that would have been difficult for us to reach alone."
Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, technology vice president at AWS, explained that DuckDB was created for "blazingly fast performance for the 90%+ of data queries in the world today, that often runs 1 terabyte of data or less as part of analysis and dashboarding." She argued that DuckDB's optimisations are particularly relevant for agentic AI workloads, where AI agents run small exploratory queries before deciding how to proceed.
The community has greeted the news with cautious optimism. On Reddit, user adappergentlefolk wrote: "I hope this doesn't slow the pace of innovation they have been doing, but i'm glad they found a way to both cash in on their work yet keep most of it oss under the foundation."
Andy Warfield, distinguished engineer at AWS, detailed that the two teams had collaborated for about two years before the acquisition. The partnership began with work on S3 Tables and expanded to explore AWS Lambda as a launch primitive for DuckDB queries, and to smooth integrations between DuckDB and AWS database and analytics engines through DuckDB's ATTACH and CONNECT commands.