Amazon Web Services has acquired DuckLabs, the support and development company behind the open-source DuckDB database, according to The Register. The financial terms were not disclosed. The deal brings into AWS the company founded by authors of DuckDB, an in-process online analytical processing database that has gained a following among developers and analytics users. The Register reports that AWS said DuckDB and related projects will remain free and open source under their MIT licenses, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing to guide them. DuckDB’s appeal is architectural as much as commercial. Written in C++, it runs embedded inside a host process rather than requiring separate database management server software to install and maintain. The Register gives the example of the DuckDB Python package querying data directly in the Pandas software library without importing or copying it. The project originated with academics at Amsterdam’s Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, a mathematical and theoretical computing research center. The Register reports that DuckDB first went public in 2022, reached its 1.0 release in 2024, and later expanded toward data lake use cases with DuckLake, which uses DuckDB as metadata storage to address the “small changes” problem in data lakes. AWS was already close to the project before the acquisition. The Register says AWS vice president and distinguished engineer Andy Warfield told the outlet last year that AWS engineering teams were enthusiastic about DuckLake. The report also says AWS and DuckLabs had collaborated around S3 Tables, an AWS service announced in December 2024, to build first-class S3 Tables support in DuckDB. The governance question now moves to the foreground. The Register notes that although DuckDB is MIT-licensed, most contributions and strategic direction have come from DuckLabs. After the merger, DuckLabs co-founder and CEO Hannes Mühleisen told the outlet he sees a larger role for the independent DuckDB Foundation, including a possible Technical Advisory Board for stakeholders building on DuckDB. That matters because DuckDB is not only useful inside AWS workflows. The Register notes that DuckDB can read and write Google Sheets and can query and manage Google BigQuery datasets through an extension. Mühleisen said the Foundation’s exact governance and voting rights have not yet been decided, but that the goal is to create a mechanism for broader community participation. For AWS, the acquisition gives it closer proximity to a widely used open-source analytics engine that already intersects with S3 customers and AWS data services. For DuckDB users, the key near-term test is whether AWS can increase investment in the project while preserving the cross-platform neutrality that made DuckDB attractive in the first place. Who benefits: AWS benefits from deeper alignment with a database already used by S3 customers and connected to S3 Tables work. DuckDB users may benefit if AWS investment increases engineering capacity while the MIT licensing and Foundation role remain intact. Who's exposed: Users and companies building around DuckDB are exposed to governance uncertainty until the Foundation’s expanded role, Technical Advisory Board plans, and voting rights are settled. Other cloud and data-platform stakeholders will watch whether DuckDB remains visibly neutral across ecosystems.