SAP’s Data-Lakehouse Bet: Two Acquisitions in One Day Reshape the AI Battlefield

SAP buys Dremio and Prior Labs in twin deals, adding open data layer and tabular AI models to its Business Data Cloud, with Reltio rounding out a three-acquisition pipeline.

SAP has fired a warning shot across the bows of Snowflake and Databricks. The German software giant announced the acquisition of Dremio, a US-based data-lakehouse specialist, alongside the purchase of Freiburg startup Prior Labs — a twin deal that lays bare its ambition to build a fully integrated AI stack from the ground up. The moves come just weeks after SAP snapped up Reltio, marking the third strategic buy in two months.

The logic is straightforward: many corporate AI projects stumble not because the models are flawed, but because the underlying data is a mess. Information sits in silos, locked in proprietary formats and stripped of business context. Dremio’s technology tackles that head-on. It creates an open data layer that plugs directly into SAP’s Business Data Cloud, allowing users to query data in place rather than shuttling it between platforms. The architecture rests on Apache Iceberg, an open-source table format originally developed at Netflix — a choice that analyst Shashi Bellamkonda says corrects a long-standing oversight at SAP.

Prior Labs fills a different gap. The startup specialises in tabular foundation models — AI systems trained on structured, spreadsheet-style data rather than text. That is the lifeblood of enterprise software: payment histories, supply-chain risks, financial forecasts. Its flagship model, TabPFN, has already racked up over three million downloads. SAP plans to pump more than €1 billion into the lab over four years, with the acquisition price landing in the mid-hundreds of millions of euros. More than $500 million of that will go directly to the founders in cash. The lab will continue to operate as a standalone unit.

The three acquisitions form a coherent pipeline. Reltio cleans the data, Dremio unifies it, and Prior Labs supplies the AI models. The strategy will be laid out in greater detail at SAP’s Sapphire conference in Orlando this May, where management has scheduled an extensive analyst briefing.

On the financial side, the purchase price for Dremio remains undisclosed, though the company was valued at $2 billion during a 2022 funding round. Both transactions are expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, pending regulatory approval. Separately, SAP has taken a stake in Avelios Medical, a Munich-based provider of AI-powered clinical information systems, alongside Fresenius — also in the mid-hundreds of millions of euros range.

Shareholders had their say at Tuesday’s annual general meeting. René Obermann, the former Deutsche Telekom chief, was elected to the supervisory board with over 99% approval. He is set to take the chair from Pekka Ala-Pietilä in 2027, a move seen as strengthening the technological oversight of CEO Christian Klein’s strategy. Obermann will step down from the Airbus board of directors in due course.

The AGM also approved a dividend of €2.50 per share for fiscal 2025, a 6.4% increase year-on-year. The stock traded ex-dividend on Wednesday, changing hands at €151.42 — though it remains down roughly 25% since the start of the year. On Wednesday, the share price slipped to €150.40, edging up just 0.28% on the day.

The acquisitions mark SAP’s most aggressive push yet to reduce its reliance on external AI partners such as OpenAI and Snowflake. Whether the investments will shore up the company’s market valuation remains an open question — one that will likely find an answer when the third-quarter results land, by which time both deals should be formally completed.