AKAM's Record AI Cloud Deal Sparks Biggest Rally In Over 22 Years — But CEO Says There’s More Coming

• Akamai CEO Tom Leighton announced during the first-quarter earnings call that this is the largest customer deal in the company’s history.
• It comes on the heels of a $200 million deal announced by the company in February this year with a major U.S.-based technology company.
• Leighton said Akamai’s growing customer base is only the beginning, with a rapidly expanding pipeline that includes major AI infrastructure prospects.

Shares of Akamai Technologies Inc. (AKAM) were on track for the best single-day gains in more than 22 years, with the stock on track to open at the highest levels since the peak of the dot-com era.

This comes after Akamai announced that it had secured a $1.8 billion commitment from a leading frontier model provider over seven years for its cloud infrastructure services.

Akamai shares were up nearly 30% in Friday’s pre-market trade.

Largest Customer Deal In AKAM History

Akamai CEO Tom Leighton announced during the company’s first-quarter (Q1) earnings call that the $1.8 billion deal is the largest one in its history. It comes on the heels of a $200 million deal announced by the company in February this year with a major U.S.-based technology company.

“These leaders in AI have chosen Akamai because their AI workloads need the scale, performance, and reliability that our cloud platform provides. Many other enterprises have chosen Akamai for similar reasons,” Leighton said.

He added that by integrating Nvidia AI infrastructure into Akamai’s distributed platform, the company aims to move AI beyond isolated factories toward a unified inference grid. Leighton also highlighted that this will reduce the latency and costs for its customers, allowing them to run complex models within milliseconds.

Just The Beginning, Says AKAM CEO

Leighton added that the company’s expanding customer base is just the beginning, noting that Akamai has a large and rapidly expanding pipeline of prospects, including some with major AI infrastructure requirements.

He stated that Akamai was selected by a U.S.-based AI company to power its voice-first business solution, while an Indian AI video platform adopted it to scale analytics and computer vision workloads.

Meanwhile, a U.S. consumer AI company and an Indian AI commerce firm selected Akamai’s cloud and distributed inference platform for personalized agents and ad targeting, respectively, Leighton said.

He also stated that two global retail brands adopted Akamai’s distributed data capabilities to improve the performance and resilience of their online applications.

AKAM’s Q1 At A Glance

Akamai reported Q1 earnings per share (EPS) of $1.61 on revenue of $1.074 billion, edging past Wall Street estimates of an EPS of $1.6 on revenue of $1.072 billion, according to Fiscal.ai data.

The company guided EPS of $1.45 to $1.65 in the second quarter (Q2), with revenue of $1.075 billion to $1.1 billion.

Analysts at KeyBanc raised their price target for Akamai to $195 from $120 while keeping an ‘Overweight’ rating. The firm cited Akamai’s expansion of its inference revenue base as the basis for its optimistic outlook, stating that it will be the dominant theme of the company’s financials in the coming years.

How Did Retail Traders React To AKAM?

Retail sentiment on Stocktwits around Akamai trended in the ‘extremely bullish’ territory, with message volumes at ‘high’ levels at the time of writing.

AKAM stock is up 34% year-to-date and 41% over the past 12 months. The S&P 500 ETF (SPY) and the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF (VTI) are up 30% over the past 12 months.

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