Akamai reported strong Q2 2026 results, driven by significant growth in its Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) segment, which saw a 39% YoY increase. The company announced a major new $600 million customer win for robotics development, bringing total multi-year CIS commitments to over $2.8 billion this year. Management provided bullish guidance for 2027, expecting revenue growth to accelerate to the low teens, driven by a fully sold-out GPU capacity and strong pipeline. Akamai's Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) revenue grew 39% YoY in Q2 to $99 million, driven by strong AI inference demand.
Akamai reported strong Q2 2026 results, driven by significant growth in its Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) segment, which saw a 39% YoY increase. The company announced a major new $600 million customer win for robotics development, bringing total multi-year CIS commitments to over $2.8 billion this year. Management provided bullish guidance for 2027, expecting revenue growth to accelerate to the low teens, driven by a fully sold-out GPU capacity and strong pipeline. Akamai's Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) revenue grew 39% YoY in Q2 to $99 million, driven by strong AI inference demand.
Management frames Akamai as a key infrastructure provider for the AI-driven economy, with a strategy to provide a unified distributed grid for AI inference across a continuum from core to edge. They highlight demand from AI inference workloads, agentic AI, and securing AI…
Guidance · revenue to $4.4875B
The company announced a $600 million, four-year CIS deal with a US-based robotics company, contributing to total new multi-year commitments of $2.8 billion in 2026.
Management expects total company revenue growth to accelerate into the low teens in 2027, up from single-digit growth in 2026.
Management frames Akamai as a key infrastructure provider for the AI-driven economy, with a strategy to provide a unified distributed grid for AI inference across a continuum from core to edge. They highlight demand from AI inference workloads, agentic AI, and securing AI usage, citing new customer wins (including a $600M robotics deal) and a strong pipeline positioning revenue growth to accelerat
Demand signal is extremely strong: multi-year commitments signed this year total over $2.8 billion, pipeline is 'exceptionally strong', GPU capacity is 'completely sold out', and customers are pre-ordering capacity months in advance. Revenue from these deals ramps from Q4 2026 and accelerates into 2027.
CapEx is ramping sharply to support GPU demand: Q3 CapEx expected at 43-46% of revenue, and full-year CapEx about 40% of revenue. Management is investing up to $500 million in additional GPU capacity after selling out existing capacity, with most spend hitting in early 2027.
Management repeatedly expressed confidence in the AI opportunity, highlighted record bookings and a sold-out GPU capacity, and raised the medium-term growth outlook to low teens.
GPU delivery timing shifts CapEx and delays revenue recognition for contracted capacity, compressing Q3 growth but supporting a Q4 hockey stick.
“Second quarter CapEx was below our guidance, primarily driven by the timing of receipt of some GPUs. These shipments arrived a few weeks later than expected following the quarter end, pushing the bulk of the planned spend into Q3.”
Power scarcity could constrain capacity expansion, but Akamai's distributed footprint mitigates risk and gives negotiating leverage, impacting margin and growth trajectory.
“It's very attractive for data center providers where not all power is created equally, even as you go state by state. So you might be able to go a couple hundred miles from a really expensive state into a cheaper state, anchor tenant for so”
“we expect to invest up to $500 million in CapEx to replenish and expand our GPU capacity. We expect to spend approximately $60 million of that this year, with the remainder hitting in early 2027.”
“If there are movements in pricing, whether it's memory or hardware costs or things like that, we do have mechanisms to take that into consideration. And we're constantly adjusting pricing.”
“CrowdStrike told us they were dissatisfied with the inconsistent service they received from one of our SMB-focused competitors.”
| Metric | Period | Range | Midpoint | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capex | FY2026 Q3 | $0.475B–$0.525B | $0.5B | GUIDED |
| Capex | FY2026 | $1.778B–$1.812B | $1.795B | RAISED |
| EPS | FY2026 Q3 | $1.60–$1.80 | $1.70 | GUIDED |
| EPS | FY2026 | $6.40–$7.05 | $6.72 | GUIDED |
| Op margin | FY2026 | 25%–26% | 25.5% | GUIDED |
| Revenue | FY2026 | $4.445B–$4.53Binline vs consensus | $4.4875B | MAINTAINED |
| Revenue | FY2026 Q3 | $1.105B–$1.13B | $1.1175B | GUIDED |
| Issued | Metric | Target | Guide | Actual | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2025 Q3 | EPS | FY2025 Q4 | $1.65–$1.85 | $1.84 | Met / beat |
| FY2025 Q3 | Op margin | FY2025 Q4 | 28%–30% | 13.82% | Missed |
| FY2025 Q3 | Revenue | FY2025 Q4 | $1.065B–$1.085B | $1.0949B | Met / beat |
CrowdStrike's switch to Akamai for web security and content delivery validates Akamai's enterprise-grade offerings and represents a direct customer win against an SMB-focused competitor. This is a strong signal for Akamai's security business and a negative for the incumbent competitor.
… one of the world's largest banks in a $14 million upgrade to have Akamai secure all of their applications. We also signed renewal upgrades for security and CIS products with one of the world's largest telcos in a contract worth more than $20 million over two years. And today, we're also very pleased to announce that CrowdStrike, a leading AI-native cybersecurity platform, has switched to Akamai, for its web security and content delivery needs. CrowdStrike told us they were dissatisfied with the inconsistent service they received from one of our SMB-focused competitors. We see this validation from another security leader as a strong endorsement of Akamai's enterprise security capabilities and our hard-won reputation for trust, reliability, and dedicated customer support. On the go-to-market front, we recently announced that Akamai has been selected as a strategic partner for WWT's AI Readiness Model for Operational Resilience, or ARMR for short. This is the industry's first holistic, vendor-agnostic AI security framework, and our inclusion positions Akamai as a foundational security architecture for the AI factories being built by WWT and accelerated by NVIDIA. Without this …
This specific win is a signal that Akamai is taking AI inference workloads away from hyperscalers, demonstrating its competitive value proposition in a specific niche.
“Customers are already leveraging our cloud infrastructure services for a wide variety of repeatable use cases. For example, an AI patent intelligence platform in Singapore shifted its inference workloads from a hyperscaler to Akamai...”
The strong demand for GuardaCore (a product from an acquired entity) is an indicator of the health and growth of Akamai's flagship security solutions.
“Security growth was led once again by strong demand for our market-leading web app firewall, API security, and GuardaCore segmentation solutions.”
… eliminate unpredictable hyperscaler billing and accelerate their customer engagement. And a SaaS media workflow platform in the US chose us for high throughput live media encoding. Looking across our business as a whole, AI is not only driving adoption and revenue growth for Akamai Cloud, AI has also been a tailwind for our security solutions. In Q2, Akamai security revenue grew 10% year over year as reported and 9% in constant currency. Security growth was led once again by strong demand for our market-leading web app firewall, API security, and GuardaCore segmentation solutions. Our WAF continued to see strong demand in Q2 from customers eager to protect against vulnerabilities that could be exposed by frontier models like Mythos or GPT 5.5. Customers that added or significantly expanded their WAF usage in Q2 included one of the world's leading commerce sites, One of the world's leading automakers and one of the world's largest banks in a $14 million upgrade to have Akamai secure all of their applications. We also signed renewal upgrades for security and CIS products with one of the world's largest telcos in a contract worth more than $20 million over two years. And today, …
The partnership positions Akamai's security portfolio within WWT's AI security framework, which is adopted alongside NVIDIA, potentially driving future security revenue through WWT's client base.
… to Akamai, for its web security and content delivery needs. CrowdStrike told us they were dissatisfied with the inconsistent service they received from one of our SMB-focused competitors. We see this validation from another security leader as a strong endorsement of Akamai's enterprise security capabilities and our hard-won reputation for trust, reliability, and dedicated customer support. On the go-to-market front, we recently announced that Akamai has been selected as a strategic partner for WWT's AI Readiness Model for Operational Resilience, or ARMR for short. This is the industry's first holistic, vendor-agnostic AI security framework, and our inclusion positions Akamai as a foundational security architecture for the AI factories being built by WWT and accelerated by NVIDIA. Without this collaborative security framework for AI, organizations are often forced to piece together fragmented security strategies. By aligning the Akamai security portfolio with Armour, we provide a methodology to protect large-scale AI clusters proactively by preventing the lateral movement of threats. As WWT's Chris Conrad said, no single vendor can secure the AI frontier alone. Through our …
Partnerships with leading AI labs like Anthropic strengthen Akamai's security credibility and provide early access to emerging AI threats, indirectly benefiting its security product roadmap.
… fragmented security strategies. By aligning the Akamai security portfolio with Armour, we provide a methodology to protect large-scale AI clusters proactively by preventing the lateral movement of threats. As WWT's Chris Conrad said, no single vendor can secure the AI frontier alone. Through our close partnership with Akamai, we're turning the hype of secure enterprise AI into a tangible, scalable reality for customers. Akamai is also proud to be one of the industry's must-have security providers, partnering with Anthropic and OpenAI to help ensure the safe and rapid deployment of AI-enhanced defenses. With our access to programs like GlassWing and Daybreak and our participation in programs like the Open Secure AI Alliance, We're applying our expertise to help keep major enterprises and critical infrastructure secure. As employees across all industries use AI tools more frequently, enterprises need more help to secure their workforce and prevent sensitive data from being leaked. That's why we acquired LayerX, a leading provider of secure enterprise browser and AI usage control. With LayerX, now rebranded as Akamai Workforce Protector, we're able to give security teams the deep …
Akamai's GPU capacity is completely sold out, and it is making a $500 million order for more GPUs to replenish supply, signaling an extremely tight AI inference market. — This indicates sustained, strong demand for NVIDIA GPUs beyond the major hyperscalers, confirming that the supply crunch is broad-based and likely to persist.
Hi, thanks for taking the question and congrats on the new win, customer win here. Maybe if you can just help us think about what you're seeing in terms of more appetite from customers for the CIS business in terms of pipeline. You have announced these sort of significant deals, but you're also sold out as you're indicating. So does that sort of preclude you from from signing any significant more sort of award winning customers in the near future as well. So any visibility on both those fronts would be helpful. Thank you.
Yeah, I was just going to add, so that, you know, the way to think about the commentary, so I gave you a little preview last quarter that there was a good chance we might be placing an order for more GPUs based on what we saw from the pipeline, and we were able to sell that all out. Some of that large deal will take up, you know, some of that remaining inventory, and, you know, we're placing another order with NVIDIA for, you know, significant and a chunk of additional GPUs, some to satisfy the new order, but a lot of that's covered by what we had before. And then the rest of it's based on the strong pipeline we see for additional GPU demand. Now in terms of the way the market is going at this point, customers are essentially pre-ordering in a lot of cases where a lot of folks don't have a ton of inventory on hand. So usually the conversations are about getting some GPU capacity Generally, customers want to lock that in for a long period of time. Think of it as like a reserve instance is a good analogy to what folks do in the cloud market. And we'll generally reserve that month in advance. So it actually enables us to maintain a good inventory, if you will, and not extend ourselves too far out and meet the market demands.