Matei Zaharia Receives 2025 ACM Prize in Computing
April 8, 2025
ACM has named Matei Zaharia of the University of California, Berkeley, the recipient of the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing for his visionary development of distributed data systems and computing infrastructure which has enabled large-scale machine learning, analytics, and AI at a global scale.
Zaharia is an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Co-Founder and CTO of Databricks. He started the Apache Spark open-source project during his PhD at UC Berkeley in 2009 and has worked broadly on other widely used data and AI software including Delta Lake, MLflow, Dolly, and ColBERT. Zaharia’s doctoral dissertation on Apache Spark received the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
“Matei Zaharia’s work has had a lasting impact on how data is used at scale,” said ACM President Yannis Ioannidis. “By addressing key limitations in earlier systems, he developed technologies that quickly became standard tools for data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Matei’s open-source philosophy has been essential: he made these tools accessible to all. His contributions continue to influence both research and industry, and I look forward to seeing where his current work on AI systems takes us next.”
The ACM Prize in Computing recognizes early-to-mid-career computer scientists whose research contributions have fundamental impact and broad implications. The award carries a prize of $250,000, from an endowment provided by Infosys Ltd., a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting.
