Akamai surges on big LLM deal as Cloudflare dims

This week was the best of times for Akamai and the worst of times for Cloudflare.

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.

Akamai, which has 4,300 locations in 700 cities across 130 countries, won the deal against stiff competition from hyperscalers and neoclouds. He said ...