Databricks said on Thursday that it is incorporating OpenAI’s models, including GPT-5, into its data platform as well as its AI product, Agent Bricks, as part of a $100 million multi-year deal that bets on the AI company’s ability to bring in enterprise customers.
The deal highlights the accelerating race to bring generative AI into the enterprise stack, as companies foresee demand for AI tools that can tap into corporate data securely.
Agent Bricks lets organizations build AI apps and agents on top of their enterprise data using a range of AI models. OpenAI’s latest models are now part of that menu — accessible in SQL or via API — and GPT-5 is being offered as a flagship model for Databricks customers.
The news comes nearly two months after Databricks added OpenAI’s open-weight models, gpt-oss 20B and gpt-oss 120B, to the platform. Agent Bricks can now measure how accurately the different models perform on specific tasks and fine-tunes accordingly to produce more tailored results.
“Our partnership with Databricks brings our most advanced models to where secure enterprise data already lives, making it easier for businesses to experiment, deploy, and scale AI agents with real impact,” Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer of OpenAI, said in a statement.
With this deal, Databricks is betting that enterprise customers will flock to OpenAI’s models. Under the terms, the company is on the hook to pay a minimum of $100 million to OpenAI whether or not the AI firm’s models generate that much in revenue over the life of the deal.
Neither company disclosed how long the agreement will run. If revenue ends up exceeding $100 million, OpenAI will earn more, but if it falls short, Databricks will have to pay the full amount anyway. For Databricks, it means potential downside risk; for OpenAI, it means predictable income at a time when the company is trying to rapidly build out more data centers.
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The deal is similar to the one Databricks reached with Anthropic earlier this year, setting a revenue target of $100 million over five years.
A Databricks spokesperson told TechCrunch that the firm has already seen overwhelming demand from customers, including Mastercard, for native access to OpenAI’s models on the platform.
