What is Databricks AI

Databricks Mosaic AI is best for companies that want AI built directly on top of the data platform they already trust. The key strength here is not a flashy chat interface. It is the combination of model serving, AI functions, governance, evaluation, and private-data workflows inside Databricks.

Core offerings

  • Model Serving for real-time and batch inference.
  • AI Functions for applying models directly to data workflows.
  • Unity Gateway access to Databricks-hosted pay-per-token models and external providers.
  • Support for custom models, Databricks-hosted foundation models, and externally hosted models.
  • Governance, scaling, and route-optimised serving inside the wider Databricks platform.

Pricing

Databricks does not market Mosaic AI with one simple sticker price. Public documentation frames pricing around pay-per-token, on-demand provisioned throughput, reserved provisioned throughput, serverless compute, and model-serving SKUs. In practice, the commercial question is how inference traffic, serving topology, and the Databricks account structure translate into token charges, DBUs, and serving costs.

Model footprint

Databricks now routes hosted and external foundation-model access through Unity Gateway. Its current hosted catalogue includes partner and open-weight families such as Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, and others, with availability depending on region and serving option. For many enterprise buyers, the governed control plane, budgets, rate limits, and guardrails are more valuable than a consumer-style model picker.

Why select Databricks AI

Mosaic AI is compelling when your company’s strategic advantage lives in private data, governed analytics, and production ML or AI systems. If Databricks is already your operating backbone, keeping AI near the data is a practical advantage.

Official sources: Databricks Model Serving, Available models in Unity Gateway, Using foundation models through Unity Gateway, Serving cost monitoring.

Model disclosure note

Mosaic AI is a serving and governance layer over custom, Databricks-hosted, and external models. It is intentionally model-agnostic, so a buyer-facing page should track supported deployment patterns more than a fixed model roster.