Matei Zaharia, a Berkeley computer science professor and Databricks co-founder, has won the 2026 ACM Prize in Computing for his contributions to distributed data systems and AI infrastructure. The $250,000 prize is funded by an Infosys endowment and is one of computer science's most prestigious mid-career honours. Zaharia began building Apache Spark as a doctoral student in 2009, a faster alternative to Hadoop MapReduce, which was burdened by slow disk-based I/O between stages. Spark effectively superseded MapReduced for most analytical workloads within a few years of its release. It remains one of the most widely deployed data processing frameworks in the world. Zaharias' contributions also included creating Delta Lake, a data lakehouse architecture that combines the cost and scale advantages of a data warehouse with the consistency and governance properties of a traditional data warehouse. His work has led to the creation of DSPy, an open-source framework that automatically optimises language models for specific tasks.