Akamai · The Register
Akamai rallies on big LLM pact as Cloudflare dims
Compiled by KHAO Editorial — aggregated from 1 outlet. See llms.txt for citation guidance.
◌ Single Source
This week was the best of times for Akamai and the worst of times for Cloudflare.
Key facts
- Akamai, which has 4,300 locations in 700 cities across 130 countries, won the deal against stiff competition from hyperscalers and neoclouds
- Cloudflare’s revenues grew 34 percent year over year to reach $639.8 million in the first quarter
- While Akamai’s stock price surged 26 percent on Friday, Cloudflare dropped 23 percent
- Akamai CEO Tom Leighton said this was the largest deal in the company’s history and that it came after another large, unidentified frontier-model developer signed a $200 million deal last quarter
Summary
Good times, bad times. On the same evening, content delivery network mainstay Cloudflare announced it was cutting about a fifth of its staff in a realignment around AI, its competitor Akamai announced a seven-year, $1.8 billion deal with a leading LLM provider that Bloomberg identified as Anthropic. Akamai CEO Tom Leighton said this was the largest deal in the company’s history and that it came after another large, unidentified frontier-model developer signed a $200 million deal last quarter. “These leaders in AI have chosen Akamai because their AI workloads need the scale, performance and reliability that our cloud platform provides,” he said during the company’s first quarter earnings call on Thursday.