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.
The ACM Prize in Computing recognises 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.