Akamai Taps NVIDIA for Massive AI Platform
Akamai announced it will deploy thousands of NVIDIA's new Blackwell GPUs to build one of the world's most widely distributed AI platforms. The move signals that at-scale, cloud-based AI compute is becoming a baseline capability for both commercial and federal applications.
This move builds on Akamai's deep-rooted presence within the federal government. The company already serves all branches of the U.S. military and 14 out of 15 cabinet-level agencies. Akamai is also pursuing DoD Impact Level 4 and 5 accreditations and has achieved FedRAMP High Ready status, positioning it to handle highly sensitive government data. NVIDIA's Blackwell isn't an incremental upgrade; it's a new architecture featuring a dual-die GPU with 208 billion transistors. The full rack-scale GB200 NVL72 system, which connects 72 Blackwell GPUs with 36 Grace CPUs, can deliver up to 30 times faster real-time large language model inference compared to the prior H100 generation, while using 25 times less energy. The platform aligns directly with the Pentagon's 2023 Data, Analytics, and AI Adoption Strategy, which emphasizes a multi-cloud environment to accelerate decision advantage. The Department of Defense's (DoD) approach is to leverage commercial cloud solutions to free up its own engineers for inherently governmental challenges. This partnership expands on an existing collaboration between Akamai and NVIDIA focused on cybersecurity for critical infrastructure. The two companies previously integrated Akamai's Guardicore segmentation software with NVIDIA's BlueField DPUs to enforce Zero Trust security at the hardware level in operational technology (OT) environments. For smaller contractors, the proliferation of such powerful, accessible AI platforms creates new avenues for teaming and subcontracting. The Army's SBIR program has active solicitations for AI/ML tools for "Context-Aware Decision Support," designed to help commanders process overwhelming data streams. Similarly, DARPA has an SBIR topic for using AI-driven models to improve battle planning and wargaming simulations.
