Akamai signed a deal worth more than KRW 12 trillion with Anthropic and its stock jumped 14%, yet the ETF for the same sector actually fell. Why is AI investment money flowing not only to chip companies but also to internet infrastructure companies like this?
2026-09-26
Causal Mechanism: AI Training and Inference Need Different Infrastructure
Akamai (AKAM) shares surged as much as 16.4% intraday after the Anthropic deal was announced, then closed up 14.2% (CNBC, 2026-09-25). By contrast, the Communication Services sector ETF XLC fell -0.90% the same day. The stock and its sector moved in opposite directions because the deal is a rerating of Akamai alone, not of the sector as a whole.
The deal structure shows why. Anthropic will commit $11.6 billion over seven years (up to $20 billion if options are exercised) to Akamai's distributed cloud, and the target is CPU workloads, not GPUs (Yahoo Finance/Piper Sandler, 2026-09-25). This is the crux. Large-scale GPU training happens in the centralized data centers of Nvidia and the hyperscalers, but inference, which generates real-time answers once a model is in service, needs to be processed physically close to users to reduce latency. CDN providers like Akamai already have points of presence all over the world, so they hold exactly the infrastructure needed as AI shifts from "training" to "serving." IDC expects half of enterprise AI inference workloads to run at the edge and on devices by 2030 (Network World).
Analyst Reactions Are Mixed
| Firm | Assessment | Price Target |
|---|---|---|
| Piper Sandler | Rerated "from a value asset to a hypergrowth asset" | - |
| Oppenheimer | "Proves distributed cloud can win frontier AI workloads" | $180 |
| RBC Capital | Encouraging cloud infrastructure momentum, expanding TAM | - |
| JPMorgan | Maintains Neutral, concerned about customer concentration | $167 (raised) |
JPMorgan's concern is worth noting. Anthropic alone accounts for 93% of the $14.4 billion in new contracts Akamai has won this year (CNBC, 2026-09-25). The same structural risk seen in the semiconductor supercycle — revenue concentration in a handful of large AI customers — has carried over directly to a CDN provider. That said, 24/7 Wall St reports that shares of other distributed and edge cloud companies such as CoreWeave (CRWV) and Cloudflare (NET) also rose after the announcement. This can be read as a sign that AI infrastructure money is making a "second wave" beyond GPU makers, reaching edge distribution networks.
So What Should You Do
- With 14% already priced in on the day of the announcement and cautious houses like JPMorgan in the mix, the case for chasing the stock now is weak.
- Keep open the possibility that companies with the same logic (edge, CDN, distributed cloud) get rerated as "second-wave AI beneficiaries," but if they become heavily dependent on a particular AI company, they will carry the same concentration risk as Akamai.
- The XLC weakness in today's report stems from overlapping single-stock issues, such as those related to Meta. It is right not to oversimplify this as "AI infrastructure expansion = strength across the whole sector."
Sources: Akamai stock: What Anthropic's $11.6B deal changes, Shares of Akamai surge after deal with Anthropic. What Wall Street is saying, Akamai Surges 15% on $11.6B Anthropic Cloud Deal; CoreWeave and Cloudflare Tick Up, AI inferencing is headed for the network edge