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Can Akamai's Expanding Cloud Business Boost Its Competitive Edge?

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Key Takeaways

  • AKAM expands its cloud services to support AI, enterprise software and data-intensive workloads.
  • Software and SaaS providers drive most new customer additions across regions and industries.
  • GPU demand and cloud migrations boost adoption of Akamai's Kubernetes platform.

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (AKAM - Free Report) is strengthening its position in the cloud computing market as businesses increasingly adopt artificial intelligence (AI), enterprise software and data-intensive applications that require reliable, high-performance infrastructure. Its cloud platform enables enterprises to run complex workloads while improving performance, scalability and cost efficiency.

Akamai offers a range of cloud services, including CPU-based computing, specialized GPU instances, Kubernetes infrastructure and cloud storage. Its solutions support AI model training and testing, low-latency inference, application hosting and disaster recovery, enabling enterprises to manage demanding workloads across different environments.

The company is gaining traction among software and SaaS providers, which accounted for most of its recent customer additions. Its customer base is expanding across Asia-Pacific and Japan, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with new clients in logistics, digital media, streaming and healthcare. A logistics technology company is migrating its AI-powered warehouse operations to Akamai Cloud, while a developer platform is moving nearly 1,500 microservices to its Linode Kubernetes Engine to reduce costs and improve profitability.

Akamai is also benefiting from growing demand for advanced computing resources, including GPU instances powered by NVIDIA Corporation’s (NVDA - Free Report) RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition, designed for AI and other compute-intensive applications. Additionally, media companies use its cloud infrastructure for video rendering, streaming and content processing, while healthcare organizations adopt its services for secure storage and disaster recovery.

The growing adoption of specialized GPU infrastructure and cloud-native services highlights potential growth opportunities for Akamai as enterprise computing needs continue to evolve.

How Are Competitors Performing?

Akamai faces competition from Cloudflare, Inc. (NET - Free Report) and DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. (DOCN - Free Report) . Cloudflare is expanding its cloud services to support the growing use of AI applications and autonomous agents. The company has added support for Cursor Cloud Agents in its Sandboxes, allowing developers to run AI coding agents in secure environments. Cloudflare is developing its Workers platform to help businesses run applications and AI workloads across its global network. 

DigitalOcean is advancing its AI-focused cloud offerings with new tools for developing and managing AI agents. The company introduced Agent Droplets, which combine computing, storage and AI tools under a single monthly subscription. DigitalOcean launched Agent Learning and Data Services to help businesses monitor agent performance, analyze data and improve AI applications over time.

AKAM’s Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

Akamai shares have gained 26.5% over the past year compared with the industry’’s growth of 33.8%.

Zacks Investment Research
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

Going by the price/earnings ratio, the company's shares currently trade at 13.68 forward earnings, lower than 21.48 for the industry.

Zacks Investment Research
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

Earnings estimates for 2026 have declined 1.3% to $6.62 over the past 60 days, while those for 2027 have decreased 5% to $6.78.

Zacks Investment Research
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

Akamai stock currently carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). 

You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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