Overview
- Akamai disclosed Thursday after the bell a seven-year, $1.8 billion commitment for its Cloud Infrastructure Services from a “leading frontier model provider.”
- Multiple outlets, citing people familiar with the matter, reported the buyer is Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI system, though neither company has confirmed the identity.
- The stock jumped roughly 22% to 30% in premarket and early Friday trading as investors embraced what executives described as the largest contract in Akamai’s history.
- For the first quarter, adjusted earnings were $1.61 per share on about $1.074 billion in revenue, with cloud infrastructure services up 40% to $95 million and security revenue up 11% to $590 million.
- Akamai guided second-quarter EPS of $1.45 to $1.65 and revenue of $1.075 billion to $1.1 billion, below Wall Street’s estimates, while the deal underscores a shift to running AI inference closer to users on distributed networks rather than only in centralized hyperscale data centers.