Akamai Technologies Inc Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Thanks for having me. A great conference so far, so thank you for doing this as well.

Sure. Yeah, it has been probably the most exciting time since we first began. I have been with the company since 2000, and back then, demand was insane. Pretty much, the internet was just exploding.

Yeah. Incredible demand. We are seeing that now with AI.

We made a decision five years ago to get into the compute business, and we acquired Linode, and we always had this vision of, A, using it ourselves to start, because we were spending so much with hyperscalers, but to make that into an enterprise-grade network that would be comparable to using a hyperscaler. It may not have all the capacity and all the features, but it was an alternative, and we thought that, look, we can leverage a lot of what we have done over the years with our CDN network, leveraging a lot of the same teams that build some of the functionality, running the distributed platform, the operational teams, et cetera.

I think the big turning point for us is when we sat down with Nvidia about a year ago or so and realized that there is this big opportunity to lean into not only GPUs, but compute in a much bigger way, and start building out bigger locations and offering an offering for compute from large scale CPU and GPU deployments, doing things like post-training or support systems that go along with a lot of these big AI companies. Leveraging our platform all the way down to our MCS, our managed container service, where we are taking the Linode technology and slicing off part of the CPU that we are using for CDN and for compute to run companies' code to do things like manipulation of video and synchronization of video, doing live, real-time ad decisioning, and things like that.

It goes way beyond what we were doing before with functions as a service where you could do basic programming in WebAssembly or JavaScript. Now the customer has a lot more ability to do a lot more compute right out at the edge. So from core data centers all the way out to the edge.

Yeah. So it was really pretty simple. The first thing we did is we, over the years, built out a massive backbone. So we carry hundreds of terabits a second of traffic across our backbone. We stitch together our main CDN locations across the world. So we have this big asset that's connected up to all the locations that we acquired from Linode, and we built out another 20 or 30 or so sites that were initially 5-10 megawatts in size. So they could do a decent amount of revenue, a couple hundred million of revenue per site. All we're really doing is just now expanding those sites to be a lot larger.

We're leveraging the same teams that build the CDN network, that negotiate for colo, working with a lot of the same colo providers we've worked with in the past, and building out the platform to be able to take on all sorts of different chipsets, both CPU and GPU. It's been a relatively light lift in terms of investment in people and technology. It's been really just doing a lot more of what we're doing at a bigger scale.

Yeah. First of all, most of the 4,000 pops we wouldn't use for a frontier model. Maybe if they were using, say, there was a CDN application that was going alongside that, sure, we could use the- Different use case.