Cramer Calls Akamai 'Terrific' as 28-Year-Old CDN Pivots to AI Cloud

Twenty-eight years ago Akamai Technologies built its business speeding up other people's websites. This week Jim Cramer told a caller on Mad Money's lightning round that the stock is simply terrific, and the reason has almost nothing to do with content delivery anymore.

Akamai started in 1998, spinning technology out of MIT to cache web traffic closer to users so pages load faster. Co-founder Tom Leighton, an MIT mathematician, has run the company as CEO since 2013 and has spent the past several years pushing it into cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure, the two segments now doing the heavy lifting. In its most recent quarter Akamai topped estimates, and cloud infrastructure revenue jumped 39% year over year, helped by a four-year, $600 million deal tied to robotics workloads. Leighton has also talked up a partnership with Nvidia, telling Cramer earlier this year that the chipmaker picked Akamai for its distributed platform.

The pitch to investors is that legacy delivery, a business facing pressure as rivals exit the CDN market, gets replaced by faster-growing, higher-margin work. Management has pointed to roughly $2.8 billion in signed cloud contracts still working their way into revenue and has guided the cloud unit toward low-teens growth next year, up from mid-single digits now. Wall Street is split on how quickly that shift pays off. JPMorgan recently upgraded the stock, while Citi trimmed its price target to $122 just days before Cramer's comments, keeping a neutral stance. The average analyst rating still lands on buy.

None of that guarantees the pivot works fast enough. Akamai's older business still generates real cash but is shrinking as a share of the total, and the company has to keep spending on cloud and security capacity to win the enterprise deals it's chasing. Cramer, who also praised Cloudflare in the same segment, framed Akamai's transformation as underappreciated rather than finished. For a stock that's been public since the dot-com era, that's a notable vote of confidence, and one that puts pressure on the next few quarters to prove the growth math out.