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The Akamai Technologies logo and lettering can be seen on the headquarters building at the company's German headquarters in Garching near Munich (Bavaria). Matthias Balk | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Akamai's stock jumped 20% Friday after it announced a $1.8 billion deal with an AI company and posted first-quarter earnings that were in line with estimates. Shares are up 65% 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 in the press release Thursday. He did not name the provider. 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.
"We operate the world's most distributed platform, and we have our infrastructure in 4,300 places, 700 cities in 130 countries, and we've used that for delivering content and for providing security to intercept all the attacks, and now we're using it to support AI so our customers, agents and AI apps can run right near their users, and the data provide a much faster experience," Leighton told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Friday.
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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.
Stock Chart Icon Stock chart icon Akamai shares year-to-date.