News about Akamai

Research notes compiled by The Fly highlight several recent analyst rating changes. Raymond James upgraded Akamai (AKAM) to Strong Buy with an unchanged $170 target, citing valuation after a recent pullback, while TD Cowen raised BlackRock (BLK) to Buy with a $1,405 target, up from $1,212. Wells Fargo upgraded Venture Global (VG) to Overweight, lifting its target to $21 from $15, and BTIG moved American Electric (AEP) to Buy. On the downside, Loop Capital cut Apple (AAPL) to Hold with a $330 target, down from $370, after Apple reduced its September and December iPhone shipments by 10%, while Jefferies moved Zoetis (ZTS) and Elanco (ELAN) to Hold and Barclays cut NuScale Power (SMR) to Underweight.

Akamai is expanding its cloud platform, offering CPU and specialized GPU computing, Kubernetes and storage for AI training, low-latency inference, hosting and disaster recovery. Software and SaaS providers account for most of its recent customer additions, and new clients in logistics, digital media, streaming and healthcare are adding to its growth in Asia-Pacific, Japan, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Examples include a logistics technology company moving AI warehouse operations to Akamai Cloud and a developer platform shifting nearly 1,500 microservices to Linode Kubernetes Engine to cut costs. Demand for GPU instances powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition also supports growth. Competitors Cloudflare (NET) and DigitalOcean (DOCN) are both expanding AI offerings, with Cloudflare adding Cursor Cloud Agents support to its Sandboxes and DigitalOcean launching Agent Droplets.

Akamai Technologies has observed a significant rise in customer adoption of its cloud computing services, driven mainly by demand for high-performance computing for AI and enterprise SaaS workloads. The company says the trend spans from model training to low-latency inference, and enterprise clients use its services for applications such as cloud disaster recovery and core-to-edge application hosting. Adoption of its specialized GPU infrastructure is growing in international markets, particularly Asia-Pacific and EMEA, which the article cites as a sign of diversification beyond traditional software sectors. The roundup also notes that Oracle, Microsoft and Alphabet each closed higher in the same period.