Artificial intelligence (AI) and data company Databricks has announced an expanded collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), focusing on advancing generative AI technologies.  

This partnership aims to accelerate the development of custom models using Databricks Mosaic AI, powered by AWS Trainium chips.  

It is expected to benefit joint customers by providing advanced AI model training and serving capabilities. 

This move enables customers to pre-train, fine-tune, augment, and serve large language models on their private data, supported by AWS’s scale, performance, and security. 

The expanded partnership also brings new integrations for Databricks on the AWS Marketplace.  

Databricks said Mosaic AI Model Serving will support an array of model providers, including those available through Amazon Bedrock.  

This agreement enhances the existing partnership between Databricks and AWS, its first cloud partner.

Databricks’ AWS business has surpassed a $1bn run rate, boosted by the AWS Marketplace.

Both companies will continue investing in product capabilities and programmes to support their customers’ needs. 

The partnership also includes collaborating with systems integrator (SI) partners to migrate data estates from on-premises data centres to AWS, facilitating the modernisation of data platforms.  

As generative AI demand grows in sectors such as media and entertainment, as well as financial services, Databricks and AWS will develop joint industry solutions to address organisational challenges and foster innovation. 

Customers will find it easier to adopt and run Databricks on AWS through new integrations on AWS Marketplace, which include simplified onboarding and serverless compute options, the data company noted.   

Databricks, with its SI partners, will develop solutions to help customers optimise generative AI workloads and on-premises migrations using Databricks on AWS. 

The companies will also invest in joint marketing programmes and events, including co-branded technical resources and developer-focused events to enable customers to prototype generative AI solutions.  

Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi said: “Generative AI is disrupting every industry and a company’s data will ultimately be its competitive advantage. Strengthening our collaboration with AWS allows us to provide customers with unmatched scale and price-performance so they can bring their own generative AI applications to market more rapidly.” 

AWS CEO Matt Garman said: “By using AWS Trainium to power Mosaic AI, Databricks will make it cost-effective for customers to build and deploy generative AI applications on top of their analytics workflows, regardless of their industry or use case.  

“This powerful combination will allow businesses of all sizes to gain valuable insights from their data, helping customers innovate faster by focusing on what truly matters most for their business.” 

In June 2024, Databricks released an AI analysis tool for business intelligence that responds to prompts and creates graphs.