Superhuman AI: Decoding the Future The Big Data Arms Race in AI — Inside ClickHouse with CEO Aaron Katz
Nov 17, 2025
In this engaging discussion, Aaron Katz, CEO and co-founder of ClickHouse, shares insights on how his open-source database is foundational for AI powerhouses like OpenAI and Tesla. He explains the implications of handling a billion events per second and the critical role databases play in the evolving landscape of AI and big data. Katz also explores ClickHouse's approach to open source, its competitive advantages, and the shift towards real-time analytics. His anecdotes from Salesforce and ClickHouse’s rapid growth are not to be missed.
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Low Latency Powers LLM Interactivity
- ClickHouse's low-latency design makes it especially suitable as a backend for interactive LLM prompts.
- Low latency enables rapid back-and-forth queries required by natural-language agents.
Tesla's Billion-Event Ingestion
- Tesla publicly ingests a billion events per second into ClickHouse for observability.
- They run thousands of concurrent queries with massive retention thanks to ClickHouse compression.
Databases Gain Importance With AI
- Databases become more important, not less, as AI enables ad-hoc querying by non-analysts.
- AI will disrupt traditional BI by turning dashboards into conversational, exploratory data access.