Akamai's stock jumped in early trading Friday after it announced a $1.8 billion deal with an AI company and posted first-quarter earnings that were in line with estimates.
The stock was last up 25% in premarket trading, and shares are up 37% over the past 12 months.
A "leading frontier model provider" has committed to $1.8 billion over seven years for cloud infrastructure services, Akamai's CEO Tom Leighton said Thursday. He did not name the provider.
"Our security portfolio is also uniquely positioned to benefit from the rapid evolution of AI, with our enterprise customers needing our security products and expertise more than ever before," he added.
The American cybersecurity and cloud computing firm reported Thursday that first-quarter revenue rose 6% to over $1 billion.
The company's cloud infrastructure services revenue jumped 40% to $95 million, and security revenue was up 11% to $590 million. Meanwhile, its delivery and other cloud applications revenue fell 7% to $389 million in the quarter.
Akamai said it expects revenue in the second quarter of between $1.08 billion and $.1.1 billion and adjusted net income per share between $1.45 and $1.65.
Inference cloud
The company has been scaling its cloud infrastructure business to meet rising demand for AI workloads and carve a name for itself alongside leading AI model developers like OpenAI and Anthropic, Akamai's Chief Technology Officer Robert Blumofe told CNBC last week.
Blumofe explained that the company has three key pillars: content delivery, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure services.
"The third pillar of our business, which is more recent, is what we call cloud infrastructure services... and that's actually the fastest growing part of our business, though it's the smallest of the three," Blumofe said.
He added that Akamai already runs an AI-operated inference cloud which provides computing power, data storage, and the tools needed to run AI applications.
It currently operates in several locations where it can secure strong connections to users. The company plans to expand further and improve how it manages resources across its network.
— CNBC's April Roach helped contribute to this report.
