--- title: DuckLabs (the company behind DuckDB) is joining AWS description: DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB, is becoming a new subsidiary of Amazon Web Services, effective early September. DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and other... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ducklabs-the-company-behind-duckdb-is-joining-aws-tq2z4se6n twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: DuckLabs (the company behind DuckDB) is joining AWS | daily.dev og:description: DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB, is becoming a new subsidiary of Amazon Web Services, effective early September. DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and other... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ducklabs-the-company-behind-duckdb-is-joining-aws-tq2z4se6n og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/tq2Z4SE6N.png og:image:alt: DuckLabs (the company behind DuckDB) is joining AWS og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # DuckLabs (the company behind DuckDB) is joining AWS **[Collections](https://daily.dev/sources/collections)** · 3 min read · 2 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB, is becoming a new subsidiary of Amazon Web Services, effective early September. DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and other extensions remain free and open source under the MIT license, stewarded by the non-profit DuckDB Foundation, with roadmap, licensing, and governance unchanged. A stakeholder advisory board will be created, and prior limits on community support are being removed. Corey Quinn added a lighthearted anecdote about initially misreading the announcement as involving his own company, Duckbill Group. ## Content Amazon Web Services has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the roughly 30-person Amsterdam company responsible for building and maintaining DuckDB, the popular open-source in-process analytical database. The deal is expected to close in early September, with DuckLabs operating as a wholly-owned AWS subsidiary. The open-source project itself isn't changing hands. DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and related extensions remain under the independent DuckDB Foundation, MIT-licensed, with the same governance model. AWS says it's establishing a stakeholder advisory board and lifting previous limitations on community support. ## What DuckLabs actually is It's worth being clear about the structure here, because it's easy to conflate the pieces. DuckDB is the open-source project. The DuckDB Foundation holds the IP and license. DuckLabs was the founding team and core maintainers — the people who actually write the code — operating as a separate commercial entity. MotherDuck is a distinct company that built a cloud service on top of DuckDB. AWS bought DuckLabs, not the project or the foundation. The DuckLabs team chose acquisition over venture funding, a decision that mirrors Databricks buying Tabular (the team behind Apache Iceberg's original development). The analogy is instructive: Databricks now has real influence over Spark, Delta Lake, and Iceberg without formally owning them. Expect something similar here. ## Why this makes sense for AWS Andy Warfield of AWS published a piece tracing the physics behind DuckDB's rise. The short version: modern single machines have enough RAM, fast-enough CPUs, and cheap-enough NVMe storage that many analytical workloads no longer need to be distributed across a cluster. MapReduce and Spark made sense when you couldn't fit data or compute on one box. That's less true now. DuckDB runs as an embedded library rather than a remote service, which means it goes where the data is rather than requiring data to move to it. AWS has been integrating DuckDB with S3 Tables and Iceberg support already. The acquisition accelerates that. Analysts expect AWS to embed DuckDB deeper into existing services — S3 Tables, SageMaker Lakehouse, Athena, Redshift, EMR, Glue — potentially building a serverless query layer against S3 and Iceberg tables without requiring users to spin up a separate cluster. DuckLake 1.0, DuckLabs' alternative to Apache Iceberg for table format management, also gives AWS a card to play in the ongoing open table format competition. ## What it means for the ecosystem The license keeps DuckDB portable, but AWS effectively becomes its de facto owner in the sense that matters most: the roadmap will reflect AWS priorities. That's not necessarily bad for users — AWS has strong incentives to keep DuckDB fast and widely adopted — but it's worth being clear-eyed about. MotherDuck's CEO, reflecting on four years of partnership with the DuckLabs team, welcomed the news and announced that MotherDuck is now offering enterprise support (something it previously avoided to not compete with DuckLabs directly). He drew a parallel to the Snowflake/BigQuery/Redshift era, suggesting that an eventual Amazon-built DuckDB cloud service would validate the market rather than kill it. The DuckDB project itself remains free. The people who built it now work for AWS. Whether those two facts stay compatible long-term is the question worth watching. ## Questions this post answers ### Did AWS acquire DuckDB or the company behind it? AWS acquired DuckLabs, the roughly 30-person Amsterdam company that built and maintains DuckDB, not the open-source project itself. DuckDB, DuckLake, and related extensions remain under the independent DuckDB Foundation, staying MIT-licensed with the same governance model. The deal is expected to close in early September, with DuckLabs operating as a wholly-owned AWS subsidiary. _daily.dev helps engineers track how ownership shifts like this affect a database's roadmap and licensing._ ### How is the DuckLabs acquisition by AWS similar to Databricks buying Tabular? Both deals give a cloud provider outsized influence over an open standard without formal ownership: Databricks bought Tabular, the team behind Apache Iceberg's original development, and now has real influence over Spark, Delta Lake, and Iceberg; AWS buying DuckLabs is expected to work the same way for DuckDB, since the license and foundation stay separate but the roadmap follows the acquirer's priorities. _Teams choosing a table format or embedded database watch precedents like this on daily.dev before committing._ ### What is DuckLake and how does it relate to Apache Iceberg? DuckLake is DuckLabs' alternative to Apache Iceberg for table format management, now at version 1.0. Its existence gives AWS an additional card to play in the ongoing competition between open table formats, alongside its existing S3 Tables and Iceberg support, as AWS looks to embed DuckDB deeper into services like Athena, Redshift, EMR, and Glue. _Evaluating table formats like DuckLake versus Iceberg is easier when following the shifts on daily.dev._ --- Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#aws](https://daily.dev/tags/aws), [#backend](https://daily.dev/tags/backend), [#duckdb](https://daily.dev/tags/duckdb) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ducklabs-the-company-behind-duckdb-is-joining-aws-tq2z4se6n) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"DuckLabs (the company behind DuckDB) is joining AWS","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/ducklabs-the-company-behind-duckdb-is-joining-aws-tq2z4se6n","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/ducklabs-the-company-behind-duckdb-is-joining-aws-tq2z4se6n"},"datePublished":"2026-08-26T13:16:32.257Z","dateModified":"2026-09-13T19:30:18.675Z","description":"DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB, is becoming a new subsidiary of Amazon Web Services, effective early September. 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