Akamai to deploy thousands of NVIDIA blackwell GPUs to create a widely distributed AI platforms

Akamai announced the acquisition of thousands of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to bolster its global distributed cloud infrastructure. The deployment creates a unified platform for AI R&D, fine-tuning, and post-training optimisation that intelligently routes AI inference workloads to optimised compute resources across Akamai’s massive global network. The architecture is designed to support rapid inference by reducing the latency and data egress issues associated with centralised data centres.

While the first wave of AI focused on model training in centralised hubs, the industry has reached a tipping point where inference matters as much as training. The MIT Technology Review recently reported that 56 percent of organisations cite latency as the primary barrier preventing AI deployment at scale. By treating the globe as a single, low-latency backplane, Akamai is bridging this gap and providing the foundational infrastructure for physical and agentic AI where decisions must happen at the speed ...