Databricks outlines $3 billion investment in Europe and the Middle East

Businesses across Europe and the Middle East would get more local Databricks engineers and AI specialists under a roughly $3 billion investment plan announced on November 11, 2026. The three-year commitment aims to help customers move AI beyond pilot projects, with more regional research and development and staff working alongside customers and partners.

Databricks calls this its largest regional investment outside North America. The announcement combines a spending commitment for Europe and the Middle East with staffing and training goals covering EMEA—the wider region that also includes Africa. Those commitments have different deadlines: three years for the investment and team growth, and 2030 for training.

More specialists near customers

The company already has more than 2,000 employees in EMEA. Over the past year, it opened offices in Amsterdam, Milan, Zurich and Frankfurt. The next phase would put more engineers, AI experts and customer teams in local markets to help organizations use its platform across their businesses.

Research and development is another part of the commitment. Core pieces of the Databricks platform are built at engineering hubs in Amsterdam, Berlin, Belgrade and Aarhus, all of which grew over the past year. Databricks says closer contact with regional customers can help engineers turn requirements around governance, model choice and costs into product capabilities faster.

Approximately 50%Expected EMEA team growth

Databricks expects to grow its EMEA workforce by approximately 50% over the next three years.

Helping existing AI tools reach wider use

The investment is intended to scale adoption of three Databricks products: Lakebase, Genie and Unity Gateway. Lakebase is a managed Postgres database for AI applications and agents. Genie lets people ask questions about business data in plain language, while Unity Gateway provides a central place to govern access to multiple AI models, route requests and manage spending.

Databricks frames the deployment challenge around four needs: giving AI business context, controlling what agents can access and do, avoiding platform lock-in, and keeping costs manageable as usage grows. For Genie, that context comes through Genie Ontology, a layer built on business definitions, metrics and trusted sources. The company says this grounds the assistant’s answers and actions in an organization’s own knowledge.

A training goal that reaches beyond employees

Alongside the investment, Databricks plans to train approximately 500,000 students and professionals across EMEA in data and AI skills by 2030. The program targets people outside its workforce as well as working professionals, with free starting access available to students, job seekers and others through Databricks Free Edition.

The training covers several kinds of work, rather than only asking an assistant questions:

• Putting AI assistants such as Genie to work.
• Building and shipping applications that use AI agents.
• Context engineering, which Databricks says is now backed by a new certification.

Databricks reports more than 80,000 EMEA sign-ups for Free Edition over the past year. It also says professional certifications earned across its EMEA partner network increased 70% year over year. Those figures measure registrations and credentials, respectively; the new half-million-person commitment is a training target for 2030, not a count of people already trained.