AWS Agrees to Buy 30-Person DuckLabs as DuckDB Stays Under MIT License
Updated
Updated · InfoWorld · Aug 27
AWS Agrees to Buy 30-Person DuckLabs as DuckDB Stays Under MIT License
3 articles · Updated · InfoWorld · Aug 27
Summary
AWS signed a definitive agreement to acquire Amsterdam-based DuckLabs, bringing its roughly 30 employees in-house while leaving the DuckDB open-source project under the independent DuckDB Foundation.
DuckDB and related products will remain available under the permissive MIT license, but AWS did not disclose financial terms or a closing date for the deal.
Analysts said the main payoff is likely inside AWS’s existing analytics stack, where DuckDB could power serverless, low-cost querying across S3 and Iceberg data rather than emerge as a standalone database product.
DuckLabs’ DuckLake 1.0 release in April 2026 also gives AWS more expertise in open table formats, an area growing in importance as enterprises try to avoid dependence on a single warehouse platform.
That structure preserves formal openness, but analysts warned AWS now becomes DuckDB’s de facto center of gravity, potentially steering roadmap priorities toward AWS-centric use cases and complicating multi-cloud planning.