Databricks acquires Electric, giving AI agents their own Postgres

Databricks acquired Electric, the company behind the WebAssembly Postgres project PGlite, folding its team into Neon, the serverless Postgres provider Databricks bought last year to build its Lakebase database service. Neither company disclosed financial terms in the August 11 announcement.

PGlite runs a full Postgres instance inside a browser tab, a Node process, or an AI agent's sandbox, with no separate database server to stand up. Weekly downloads grew from roughly 1 million to 13 million over the past year, according to Databricks. The idea behind pairing it with Electric's sync engine: give each AI agent its own local, queryable Postgres instance instead of routing every agent through one shared connection pool, then keep that local state synced with the central Lakebase Postgres system.

For anyone orchestrating multiple coding or task agents against a database rather than building a single request/response app, this targets a real gap. Isolated per-agent state has mostly meant hand-rolled SQLite files or throwaway containers. A maintained sync layer between local and central Postgres cuts down that plumbing.

Existing Electric Cloud customers should take note: Electric is shutting down that hosted service as part of the move and says it will help affected users migrate to self-hosting or another provider. The open-source projects, PGlite, Postgres Sync, TanStack DB, and Durable Streams, stay Apache 2.0 licensed and continue development inside Neon at Databricks.