ClickHouse customer base soars on back of AI demand

Real-time data platform provider ClickHouse is experiencing rapid customer growth as organisations increasingly turn to AI agents and real-time applications, with the company positioning its database technology as a key component of the emerging AI application stack.

As it looks to scale its growth even futher across Australia and the wider APAC region, ClickHouse executives and customers gathered at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art for a day of keynote speeches and tech demos.

This year has seen a huge surge in demand for the ClickHouse platform - and there are plans in the works to continue that growth, in the local region, as well as globally.

It added 1000 customers in the early part of 2026, with AI adoption emerging as a major driver of demand, bringing its total customer base to over 4000.

Speaking at ClickHouse Open House in Sydney, Paul Davis, Vice President Sales ANZ at ClickHouse, said its very substantial pace of growth has impressed the company's leadership team.

"The explosive adoption of AI in the enterprise has compounded our growth over the last quarter," Davis said.

One factor has been the growing influence of AI tools themselves in technology purchasing decisions.

Davis pointed to Anthropic as an example, explaining the AI company discovered ClickHouse after asking its own Claude model which database would be most resource-efficient for managing observability workloads.

Anthropic subsequently became a ClickHouse customer.

Davis also highlighted customer deployments from organisations including Nine and Canva, which have used ClickHouse for observability and real-time analytics workloads.

But executives believe the surge in its customer base is about more than just an increase in traditional database demand for various use cases. Increasingly, customers are embracing agentic applications.

The technology industry is undergoing a major shift as companies moved from conventional application architectures towards apps built around AI agents, according to Ed Lenta, Vice President APJ at ClickHouse.

"Suddenly, applications are being built very, very proximate to the data, and applications now are being built using agents," he said.

Lenta described the shift as a 'massive inflection' in how organisations approach technology, explaining that ClickHouse's focus on real-time data puts it in a strong position.

Agents require access to large volumes of data, but they interact with that information differently from human users.

Lenta explained that the business had invested heavily in supporting those requirements, including capabilities aimed at agentic observability.

The goal is to allow organisations to monitor and govern AI agents, including understanding what they are doing, whether they are operating within expected parameters and how much they cost to run.

"Agents need access to data in ways that are completely different to the ways in which humans need access to data," Lenta said.

"The ClickHouse platform is ideal for the ways in which agents want to access data, for the patents that they use to access data."

ClickHouse has also expanded beyond traditional analytical database workloads, adding transactional capabilities and attempting to reduce the distinction between transactional and analytical data.

This allows agents to access both types of information through the same underlying platform.

Relationships with major AI companies are also being used as a proof point for its strategy.

Organisations such as Anthropic using ClickHouse demonstrates that the platform can support the demands of AI applications.

Customer use cases are also expanding beyond traditional observability.

Canva, as an example, has progressed from using ClickHouse for observability to exploring LLM observability and other real-time analytics applications.

As a result of its impressive growth, the San Francisco-based company is also increasing its focus on Australia and the APAC region.

It is hiring more local employees and engineers as it expands in the region, with the company now available across AWS and Google Cloud regions locally and having recently launched its Azure offering in Australia.