AWS acquires DuckLabs; DuckDB stays open under the Foundation
The team behind the 3M-downloads-a-day database joins AWS. What stays open, what deep S3 integration means, and the signed-extension unlock coming.
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The deal: DuckLabs joins AWS, team stays in Amsterdam
AWS signed a definitive agreement to buy DuckLabs, the Amsterdam company behind DuckDB, expected to close in September. Co-founders Hannes Muhleisen and Mark Raasveldt keep leading the core engineering team and the project's technical direction from inside AWS. Terms weren't disclosed.
DuckDB stays MIT, under the independent Foundation
AWS's explicit commitment: DuckDB, plus DuckLake and Quack, 'will always be free to use under their MIT licenses,' with stewardship staying at the non-profit DuckDB Foundation rather than Amazon. If DuckDB sits in your data or RAG pipeline, the license you build on doesn't change today.
What 'runs best on AWS' means for your stack
AWS pledged to make 'DuckDB applications run best on AWS' and to deepen integration with S3 Tables and SageMaker Lakehouse, extending a 2025 collaboration. The upside is tighter lakehouse querying; the thing to watch is whether AWS-native paths start outpacing vendor-neutral ones.
Signed extensions and an advisory board are coming
AWS plans to open DuckDB's extension ecosystem to signed third-party extensions and stand up a technical advisory board inside the Foundation. For builders, signed extensions mean safer distribution of community add-ons like spatial, vss and httpfs without hand-trusting binaries.
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