Ali Ghodsi was born in Tehran in December 1978. His family left Iran in 1983 and moved to Stockholm. He is an Iranian-Swedish-American computer scientist and holds American and Swedish citizenship.
He studied computer engineering and business at Mid-Sweden University, graduating in 2002, and finished a PhD in distributed computing at KTH in 2006. He co-founded the peer-to-peer company Peerialism and taught at KTH before moving to California.
In 2009 he went to UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar and helped start the Apache Mesos and Apache Spark projects. Four years later, in 2013, he co-founded Databricks with other Berkeley researchers, including Matei Zaharia and Ion Stoica, to commercialise Spark. He became president of engineering and took over as CEO in 2016.
Databricks bought MosaicML in 2023 and Tabular in 2024. A $10 billion round in December 2024 valued it at $62 billion, and a Coatue-led $5 billion round in August 2026 valued it at $190 billion. The company reported an annualised revenue run rate of about $7 billion in August 2026. In 2026 Ghodsi was named to the TIME100 AI list.