Announcing the winners of the 2026 Databricks Customer Awards

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Summary

Announcing the 2026 Databricks Customer Awards winners: 10 customers recognized across categories spanning excellence, innovation, transformation, social impact and leadership.

This year's winners represent a diverse range of industries and regions — from energy and semiconductors to dairy co-ops and nonprofits — all using Databricks to solve complex, real-world challenges with data and AI.

Congratulations to all the winners who turn data and AI into real-world results every day.

The 2026 Databricks Customer Awards recognize organizations and leaders who are using the Databricks Platform to solve hard problems and deliver results that matter, from ingesting 10 trillion rows of data a year to helping match medical volunteers to underserved communities across the globe. This year's Named Awards winners span 8 categories and 4 regions, representing industries as varied as semiconductors, clean energy, dairy farming, telecommunications and enterprise software. What they share is a belief that data and AI can change how an industry operates. Meet the winners. Excellence Award - North America: Applied Materials Applied Materials is a leading semiconductor and materials engineering company that designs and manufactures the equipment used to make virtually every new chip in the world. Behind that equipment sits an equally critical asset: a vast estate of engineering, manufacturing, supply chain and finance data that the company has long brought together in a central data lake. The original lake, built on Hadoop, did its job — it consolidated the data. But the demands had changed: AI workloads, real-time analytics, governed self-service and use cases the original architecture was never designed for required a new approach. Applied Materials uses the Databricks Platform to modernize that foundation — moving from a storage-and-batch data lake to a lakehouse where governance, analytics and AI live together. The shift was less about consolidating data than about unlocking what could ultimately be done with it. Less than a year post go-live, the platform delivered: Governed data assets that put trusted information directly in the hands of the people who need it. Fine-grained access controls, lineage and policy enforcement are built into the platform, ensuring that engineering, manufacturing and customer data stays protected as it scales. More than 1,500 analysts now have self-service access across engineering, operations and finance — and they’re using it, with more than 17 million self-service queries already run on the platform. Data availability improved by more than 60 percent, cutting wait times to well under an hour. AI moved into the everyday, with more than 100 machine learning models in production serving 75,000 hits a day on average — flagging anomalies on the factory floor, forecasting demand and supporting decisions faster. New use cases became cheaper and faster to build , supported by more than 1,300 AI Assistant users generating more than 100,000 interactions per month. Development is 90 percent faster, with pipeline coding compressed from 8 hours to 30 minutes. Job failure rates have dropped by 50 percent, and maintenance overhead is 75 percent lower — meaning more use cases shipped and scaled across the business. With AI/BI Genie, asking a question of the data no longer requires a dashboard, a ticket or a week. More than 800 Genie Spaces are now live, hosting more than 6,000 conversations and 18,000+ messages — putting natural-language access to data directly in the hands of teams across the organization.

What started as a platform modernization has become more of a way of working. AI now sits alongside the people who design the machines that make the world's chips — not as a tool they pick up occasionally, but as a day-to-day collaborator. Data runs through the full lifecycle of how Applied Materials operates, from insight to action, making "data-driven" less a slogan than the default mode of innovating, optimizing and deciding. Excellence Award - EMEA: Virgin Atlantic Virgin Atlantic was founded by entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson in 1984, with innovation and amazing customer service at its core. Headquartered in London, the airline operates flights to 28 destinations year-round. Alongside its shareholder and partner, Delta Air Lines, Virgin Atlantic operates a leading transatlantic network with onward connections to over 200 cities worldwide. Virgin Atlantic brings together customer, commercial, financial and operational data that previously sat in separate systems. It uses the Databricks Platform as an integrated, enterprise‑scale decision environment, connecting these domains on a unified, governed foundation so teams can work from shared data rather than isolated reports. On this foundation, Virgin Atlantic: Runs customer, commercial, financial and operational use cases on a single platform. Uses shared data and metrics to inform decisions across teams instead of relying on point solutions. Builds and iterates on new data and AI solutions quickly so insight moves into frontline decisions.

Taken together, this approach turns data into an end‑to‑end story rather than a set of disconnected projects. Virgin Atlantic treats being data‑driven as a way of running the airline, using a unified platform so insights flow across functions and support more timely, coordinated decisions for both customers and operations. Excellence Award - APJ: Fonterra Co‑operative Group Fonterra Co-operative Group is one of the largest dairy cooperatives in the world, owned by thousands of New Zealand farmer shareholders and supplying natural dairy to customers globally. Data and AI help Fonterra gain the insights it needs to run complex operations around financial planning and supply chain decisions more efficiently across its global network. Historically, Fonterra relied on several legacy analytics platforms that could create complexity, duplication and delays for business users. After migrating to Databricks, they centralized Fonterra data in a governed lakehouse, reducing manual data movement and enabling teams to turn data into decisions faster and more reliably. On this foundation, Fonterra: Democratizes access to governed, reusable data products for business units, giving practitioners clear lineage and fine-grained access control, while using natural language…