Databricks is acquiring Electric, a startup that brings WebAssembly-based Postgres databases into application environments, for an undisclosed sum, in an effort to provide developers a way to run data closer to AI agents as they build increasingly autonomous applications.

While traditional applications typically rely on a centralized database to handle application data, agentic applications can involve multiple agents working independently for minutes or hours, performing numerous operations, creating the need to access a centralized database repeatedly.

Databricks argues that those repeated trips could add undesired latency to the application, in turn creating a case for local, isolated databases where agents can work with data directly while still synchronizing with a central database to avoid latency issues.