Edge & Content Delivery

Cloudflare and Deutsche Telekom announced a new partnership to expand enterprise security and connectivity services across Europe. Under the deal, Deutsche Telekom plans to offer Cloudflare's security and connectivity products to its enterprise customers through its existing sales and service channels. The collaboration includes solutions designed for European corporates running AI workloads and other data intensive applications. Deutsche Telekom's T-Systems arm effectively becomes a regional force multiplier for Cloudflare, though leaning on a large carrier intermediates Cloudflare's customer relationships and could add to customer-concentration risk. The article was produced by Simply Wall St.

Akamai announced that SoftServe, an AI and technology services company with expertise in data and cloud solutions, has joined the Akamai Partner Connect program. The partnership is aimed at helping enterprises optimize multicloud environments, lower infrastructure costs, and accelerate edge AI deployments. SoftServe's offerings under the program include cloud strategy support to optimize compute resources and budget for long-term growth, custom-built small and large language models and AI inferencing optimized for distributed infrastructure and GPU networks, and advisory and development services for deep and emerging technologies. The collaboration provides AI consulting, digital modernization, and specialized managed services to customers in verticals including high tech, healthcare, financial services, and industrial and manufacturing. SoftServe Vice President of Technology Olga Salaichuk said the partnership handles complex back-end tasks so client teams can focus on building, while Akamai Senior Vice President of Global Cloud Sales Parimal Pandya said SoftServe's AI expertise combined with Akamai's global scale builds a foundation for customers' biggest projects. Akamai and SoftServe are exhibiting at NVIDIA GTC Berlin 2026, October 20 to 22, at booths 3064 and 7028, respectively.

Cloudflare announced on September 15 a new Accountable designation for AI crawling alongside the launch of Disallow AI Training, a tool letting website owners block AI models from scraping their content for training while keeping it fully indexable in traditional search results. The company set compliance criteria for crawler operators, and major tech players including Apple, Google, and Microsoft have achieved or committed to the Accountable framework, while mixed-use crawlers that fail to comply face network-level blocks when a site owner enables the training block. Cloudflare reported Q2 2026 total revenue of $696.1 million, up 36% year-over-year, with a 120% net retention rate, operating cash flow of $117.6 million, free cash flow of $56.4 million, and $4.16 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and available-for-sale securities. Management guided Q3 2026 revenue to between $736 million and $737 million and full-year 2026 revenue to $2.864 billion to $2.870 billion. The company's Q2 2026 GAAP gross margin slipped to 71.8% from 74.9% a year earlier, and its GAAP operating loss widened to $205.7 million, or 29.6% of revenue, from $67.3 million, with a GAAP net loss of $170.0 million, or $0.48 per share.

Spectrum has begun activating computing power across its network, placing distributed compute capacity within 10 milliseconds of 500 million connected devices in homes and businesses across the U.S. through more than 1,000 smaller owned and operated edge data centers already built into its infrastructure. The company said it is enabling new AI applications with Cast AI, HP and Hydra Host, marking a commercial adoption milestone for its Edge Compute Infrastructure platform powered by NVIDIA. Cast AI, HP and World Wide Technology will join Spectrum at SCTE TechExpo 26 to demonstrate low-latency AI workloads, including a robotics demonstration from WWT featuring a Unitree G1 humanoid robot in Spectrum's booth B335. Cast AI will highlight its OMNI technology integrating NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra-based accelerated computing platforms into hyperscale cloud environments, while HP will showcase HP Z Boost and its ZGX Nano and ZGX Fury AI Stations for enterprise edge AI development. Spectrum also has an agreement with Hydra Host allowing Hydra's AI Factory platform to use capacity owned, hosted and operated by Spectrum on its ECI platform.

The People's Bank of China and seven other departments jointly issued the Guiding Opinions on Financial Support for Expanding Capacity and Improving Quality in the Service Sector, proposing to empower the innovative development of software and information technology services. The opinions guide financial institutions to comprehensively use diversified tools such as credit, bonds, and equity to support the development of AI plus software, promote innovative breakthroughs in intelligent programming tools and industrial software, the building of basic software ecosystems and open-source communities, and the application of smart audio-visual system ecosystem scenarios, while also developing new business forms such as agent-as-a-service and model-as-a-service. The opinions also propose improving financial safeguards for the digital and intelligent transformation of manufacturing, actively meeting financing needs in areas such as AI technology research and development, the construction of high-quality industry datasets, the expansion of application scenarios, and the cultivation of industrial ecosystems. They also encourage financial institutions to provide medium- and long-term financing for the construction of digital infrastructure such as information transmission, data, and information technology, and to strengthen financial support for the national computing power layout, edge computing construction, and intelligent computing cloud service systems.

Fastly laid out a platform strategy at its September 22 Investor Day that targets $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion of revenue in 2029, a 14% to 21% annualized growth rate from 2026, alongside 67% to 71% gross margins, 20% to 22% operating margins, and 12% to 15% free cash flow margin. Shares jumped 14% after management outlined the path toward double-digit annual growth. The company said 72% of its customers now use at least two product suites, up from 58% two years ago, and 30% use four or more, up from 7%, while Q2 revenue rose 23% year over year, net revenue retention climbed to 117% from 113% in Q1, and remaining performance obligations increased 38% to $341 million. Fastly cited its own research finding AI traffic grew roughly 6.5 times faster than human traffic between January and May 2026, with more than half of AI requests requiring origin access versus less than 9% of human requests, and on September 21 it launched AI Runtime Control, AI Firewall, and new API Security capabilities. An Odd Diligence analysis of tests involving Meta's Muse assistant found Fastly in 29.3% of tests, suggesting it may play a meaningful role in some Muse agentic workloads. At the end of Q2, 28 hedge funds held Fastly, down from 41 in Q1 and 37 in Q4 2025, though D.E. Shaw increased its stake 153% to more than 6.6 million shares.

Akamai Technologies announced in September 2026 that Anthropic has committed US$11.60 billion over seven years to use Akamai Cloud's distributed AI infrastructure, an agreement that could expand to about US$20.00 billion and comes with warrants for Anthropic to acquire up to roughly 5% of Akamai's equity through non-voting convertible preferred shares. The long-term AI infrastructure partnership sits alongside Akamai's 2027 earnings guidance of approximately US$150 million to US$300 million, which already reflects pressure from higher capital spending and investment in cloud and AI infrastructure. The deal is far more central to Akamai's growth narrative than its recent security and AI security partnerships with NVIDIA and Deloitte, because it directly links billions of US dollars of future spend to the company's AI infrastructure buildout. It also intensifies Akamai's biggest current risk: heavy capital spending and customer concentration tied to a single AI partner. Akamai's narrative projects US$6.0 billion in revenue and US$659.8 million in earnings by 2029, while some analysts assume about US$6.3 billion of revenue and US$961 million of earnings by 2029.

Jabil shares jumped 4.8% in afternoon trading after Akamai Technologies authorized the electronics manufacturing services provider to buy approximately $1.7 billion of memory components on Akamai's behalf. Akamai disclosed the authorization in a filing, saying the purchase supports capital spending tied to its expanded agreement with Anthropic, which now totals $11.6 billion of contractual commitment over seven years. Akamai said capital spending tied to that commitment is about $5.5 billion, and that 2026 capital spending would rise by about $1.7 billion to pre-purchase components, including memory. Jabil was already Akamai's contract manufacturer under a 2019 agreement, and the filing does not say how much of the $1.7 billion Jabil keeps. After the initial pop, the shares cooled to $319.80, up 2.9% from the previous close.

Anthropic has committed $11.6 billion over seven years to cloud infrastructure provider Akamai, a deal covering CPU workloads that Akamai estimates will require roughly $5.5 billion in related capital spending. According to Reuters' reporting, the arrangement also includes a warrant potentially giving Anthropic a 5% stake in Akamai, and an additional $9 billion of business could expand the relationship further. The announcement does not establish that existing workloads are moving away from Amazon Web Services, but it gives Anthropic another substantial source of computing capacity. Amazon shares stood at $248.515 at 10.22am ET on September 25, just 0.33% below the $249.35 GF Value estimate. Amazon's second-quarter earnings release reported $53.4 billion in non-operating pretax other income, primarily from its Anthropic investments, gains that can lift reported earnings without representing AWS sales.

Microsoft has launched a new version of its Copilot AI assistant that merges the consumer and workplace products into a single offering aimed at corporate customers, with three modes — chat, code, and autopilot — and roughly 30 million customers so far, CEO Satya Nadella told Yahoo Finance's Deirdre Bosa in an interview. Nadella said the autopilot mode, which connects to a user's apps, email and workflows and acts as a personal assistant, represents the next generation of enterprise automation and will roll out in the coming weeks, though he cautioned that token costs mean "once the subsidies stop for everybody" the business model must be justified by customer return on investment. On China, Nadella said it is in both countries' interests to agree on norms, including a direct notification channel between presidents in the event of a cybersecurity attack, following this week's Trump-Xi summit. Separately, Costco reported quarterly profit above Wall Street estimates with earnings per share of 695 cents, including 15 cents from $184 million in tariff refunds, while comparable sales rose 6.7%. Akamai announced a $12 billion computing deal with Anthropic, building on a $1.8 billion agreement earlier in the year, with warrants giving Anthropic the right to buy Series B shares at $113.33 each that convert into 7.7 million common shares. Tesla confirmed high-volume production of its Semi had begun at its Sparks, Nevada factory and announced a 2,500-truck order from a coalition of shipping companies including PepsiCo, which Fast Company called the largest US order for electric heavy-duty trucks.

Akamai Technologies shares soared after the cloud provider inked a seven-year $11.6 billion deal to provide computing power to Anthropic. Analysts said the contract, which is entirely focused on CPUs, should boost Akamai's growth and offers an attractive profitability profile, with TD Cowen noting that as long as industry-wide computer shortages remain, Akamai should be able to win more cloud infrastructure contracts. People shares jumped on a report that MGM Resorts is discussing making a bid to purchase the Barry Diller-owned media giant, in which People owns about a 27% stake. Costco Wholesale's quarterly profits surpassed Wall Street's estimates after the company recorded a benefit of nearly $200 million related to tariff refunds, though the stock was down about 1% as analysts noted it trades at roughly 40 times forward earnings. Swedish pharma company Nanexa rose 50% after Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, agreed to pay up to 1.3 billion to license and develop Nanexa's drug delivery technology.

Akamai Technologies surged 21.3% in premarket trading after announcing a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud services commitment from AI company Anthropic, designed to support Anthropic's growing CPU workload demands across Akamai Cloud's distributed infrastructure. The deal includes provisions allowing the relationship to expand by up to an additional $9 billion, potentially taking the total commitment to about $20 billion, and Akamai also disclosed a hardware supply agreement with Lenovo and authorized contract manufacturer Jabil to procure about $1.7 billion in memory components. People Incorporated rose 6.5% in premarket trading after The Wall Street Journal reported that MGM Resorts International is weighing a potential takeover bid for Barry Diller's media conglomerate, with an offer potentially coming within days, just one day after People Incorporated withdrew its own $48.30-per-share cash proposal to acquire MGM's remaining public shares. Select Water Solutions rose 5.5% after announcing a definitive agreement to acquire Pilot Water Solutions for $700 million, plus up to $15 million in potential contingent consideration, in a transaction including $600 million in cash and $100 million in Class A common stock. Prime Medicine climbed 11.7% in after-hours trading to $3.49 after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared its Investigational New Drug application for PM647, an investigational in vivo Prime Editor designed to correct the E342K mutation in the SERPINA1 gene, the root cause of Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency, paving the way for a global first-in-human Phase 1/2 clinical trial. On the downside, Comcast slipped 1.6% in premarket trading to $21.77 after KeyBanc downgraded the stock to Underweight from Sector Weight with an $18 price target, Twilio fell 3.7% after HSBC downgraded it to Reduce from Hold with a $211 price target, Zscaler fell 3.6% after naming Ross Tackett Chief Revenue Officer effective Oct. 1, succeeding Mike Rich, and Scholastic tumbled 11% after reporting fiscal first-quarter 2027 results that missed expectations, with revenue down 3.9% year over year to $216.8 million and an adjusted loss per share of $3.63.

Akamai shares surged about 13% in after-hours trading after Anthropic struck a $12 billion deal with the company for AI computing, with Akamai also discussing longer-term capital expenditure plans. The move made Akamai the biggest after-hours mover, climbing roughly 14%. In the regular session, Oracle fell 3.5% after sending a force majeure notice to a project developer, a unit of Blue Owl Capital, regarding a massive data center being built in New Mexico, a step tied to meeting power commitments that could delay rent for Oracle even as it would still owe the rent for the full lease term once payments begin. GoDaddy rose about 4.6% after the Financial Times reported that Gen Digital, the maker of Norton 360 antivirus, made an offer for the company in a deal that would roll up a number of major legacy software brands, though the talks are in early stages and may not lead to a deal; Gen Digital shares fell more than 12%. MGM Resorts dropped 11% after Barry Diller's People Inc dropped plans to acquire the rest of the casino giant, with Diller saying the mix was not coming together as hoped. Everpure was the top S&P 500 gainer, closing up about 11% after the data storage company forecast 2028 revenue above the average analyst estimate, drawing price target hikes from Citi to 160 from 130 a share and from B of A to 180 from 150 a share.

Fastly shares jumped 13% on Wednesday as Wall Street firms weighed in on the company's investor day, held the day prior. At the event, management unveiled FY29 targets including a revenue CAGR of 14%-21%, non-GAAP operating margins of 20%-22%, and FCF margins of 12%-15%. RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria, who has a Sector Perform rating and $25 price target, said the execution required to achieve these targets alongside competitive CDN dynamics keeps him in wait-and-see mode, and noted shares traded down about 5% on the day of the event, lagging the roughly flat IGV. D.A. Davidson analyst Rudy Kessinger highlighted new AI products, saying demand for newer Bot Management and DDoS products, each growing 100%+ Y/Y, remains very robust, and he raised his price target to $23 from $21 while keeping a Neutral rating. Piper Sandler analyst James Fish said the 2029 target range was slightly above buyside expectations and could prove conservative given the rise of agentic AI.

Bandwidth reported second-quarter revenues of $219.9 million, up 22.2% year on year, exceeding analysts' expectations by 1.4%, and posted the highest guidance raise among the 12 software development stocks tracked. The company, which provides cloud-based communications software and APIs for customers including Microsoft, Google, and Zoom, saw revenue and EBITDA guidance for next quarter beat analysts' expectations, and its stock is up 3.8% since reporting, trading at $54.24. Across the group, revenues beat consensus estimates by 3.2% and next quarter's revenue guidance came in 1.8% above, with share prices up 11% on average since the latest results. Fastly delivered the best quarter in the group with revenues of $183.3 million, up 23.3% year on year and 5.3% above expectations, while Akamai posted the weakest performance, with revenues of $1.1 billion, up 5.4% year on year and 0.6% above estimates. Twilio reported revenues of $1.50 billion, up 22% year on year and 5% above expectations, and PagerDuty reported revenues of $124.4 million, flat year on year but 0.9% above expectations, adding 126 customers to reach a total of 15,506.

Cloudflare shares jumped 6.8% in the afternoon session after the company announced the general availability of Python Workers on its global developer platform. The company said on its engineering blog that Python is now a fully supported, first-class language on its edge runtime, enabling developers to natively run web frameworks such as FastAPI and Django alongside AI libraries like LangChain without custom glue code. The update targets agentic artificial-intelligence workloads by embedding socket-level networking that connects external model APIs and serverless inference directly into Cloudflare's distributed network. The launch deepens Cloudflare's positioning in automated software workflows, following management's second-quarter earnings disclosure that non-human requests now account for more than 50% of network traffic. The stock also benefited as the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield fell roughly 3 basis points to 4.97%, slipping below the 5% threshold, and as attention turned to a U.S.–China summit later in the week slated to cover trade relations and artificial intelligence cooperation. Cloudflare is up 77.2% since the beginning of the year, and at $347.27 per share, it has set a new 52-week high.

Fastly has secured a content and application delivery partnership with Comcast that will embed Fastly's edge software into more than 200 AI powered data processing centers across Comcast's nationwide network. The deal adds to a sharp run in Fastly's shares, which have posted a 90 day share price return of 33.3%, a year to date share price return of 134.15%, a 1 year total shareholder return of 176.48% and a 3 year total shareholder return of 28.97%. Fastly's most followed valuation narrative pegs fair value at $27.00, above the last close of $23.86, framing the Comcast AI deal against expectations for higher margin security and compute workloads. On a price to sales basis the stock trades at 5.5x sales, above the 4x fair ratio cited by the model but well below peers at 11.9x and the broader US IT sector at 1.8x. Risks to the upside case include Fastly's reliance on a concentrated group of large customers and pressure from hyperscalers bundling competing edge and security services.

Cloudflare said more than 50% of the traffic flowing across its network was nonhuman in the second quarter of 2026, reflecting rapid growth in AI agents and machine-to-machine traffic. The company ended the quarter with more than 7.4 million developers on its Workers platform, adding nearly two million in the quarter alone, and management said Workers remains one of the fastest-growing parts of its business. Cloudflare also introduced Monetization Gateway, Wallets and cloudflare.pay during the quarter to support transactions between AI agents, businesses and content providers. Second-quarter revenues increased 36% year over year, while dollar-based net retention reached 120%, and management said its total addressable market has expanded to more than $300 billion from $30 billion at the time of its IPO. The Zacks Consensus Estimate points to Cloudflare revenue growth of 32.5% in 2026 and 28.6% in 2027, with 2026 earnings estimated at $1.26 per share, up 35.5% from the prior year.

Xeal launched Laitent, which it calls the world's first edge inference compute network using idle EV charging capacity, tapping more than 200MW of permitted, installed electrical infrastructure across 1,600+ properties. Xeal, a member of NVIDIA Inception, plans to deploy over 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs alongside EV charging infrastructure, and has secured partnerships with Rafay Systems for AI infrastructure orchestration, Spectrum Business for dedicated enterprise-grade fiber, dozens of real estate and property managers, and a Tier 1 inference provider for up to 5MW of compute. The first Laitent Pod will be brought online with partner JVM Realty by the end of 2026. Each Laitent Pod is about the size of one parking space, contains up to 48 NVIDIA Hopper or Blackwell Ultra GPUs, requires no water hookup, and runs quiet at less than 65 decibels, offering sub-20ms latency in metro areas. Xeal said EV charging sites typically operate at less than 10% of permitted capacity, and it taps the remaining 90% for compute, with property owners able to add as much as $1m in property value for little-to-no upfront investment. Looking beyond the initial 200MW of installed charging capacity, Xeal plans to unlock over 1GW of existing headroom across real estate and EV charging deployments.

Fastly reported quarterly revenue of $183 million, up 23% year over year, with security revenue climbing 43% and delivery services revenue rising 17%, CFO Rich Wong said at a Piper Sandler conference. Remaining performance obligations increased 38% year over year, and the current portion of RPO rose 44%, which Wong attributed to stronger customer commitments amid component shortages. Wong credited the security growth to an expanded portfolio that now spans five security products, up from a single web application firewall, and to improved sales execution under Scott Lovett, who joined as head of sales in mid-2024. Bot management and DDoS protection each posted triple-digit year-over-year growth, and net retention reached a four-year high of 117%. Fastly also said it will hold an investor day at Nasdaq MarketSite in New York to discuss a longer-term operating model and its outlook over the next three years, though it does not plan to provide fiscal 2027 guidance at the event.

Cloudflare introduced new "Disallow AI Training" and AI crawler controls for website owners on 15 September 2026, letting site operators block AI training on their content while keeping pages indexable for traditional search engines. The company set criteria for "Accountable" crawlers and said it is participating in IETF efforts on open AI access standards. Cloudflare runs a global cloud network that helps businesses secure and deliver their websites and applications, and the company says the controls fit its role as an internet policy layer rather than just a content delivery utility. The launch does not yet answer how Cloudflare will charge for this layer of AI governance, or whether it becomes a paid tier versus table stakes in a market that also includes AWS and Akamai. Simply Wall St's analysis points to a $334 fair value for Cloudflare.

Cloudflare announced a new Accountable designation for AI crawling and launched Disallow AI Training, a setting that lets any website refuse AI training while staying fully in search results. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are now labeled as Accountable and have shown they meet Cloudflare's criteria or given specific timelines to meet them, while other mixed-use crawlers are blocked if site owners block training. Mixed-use crawlers, which collect content for both a search index and AI training, now make up 36.6% of verified crawler traffic on Cloudflare's network, the single largest category, and fewer than 1% of website owners block search crawlers while 17% restrict AI training. Cloudflare is replacing its Block AI Bots switch with three independent controls for search, AI training, and AI agents, and replacing Managed Robots.txt with Bot Preference Sync, which applies site owners' crawling preferences across all supported crawlers automatically. The company said every operator it designates as Accountable must give site owners a way to opt out of AI summaries, and by early next year its goal is to let site owners control how much of their content is included, in one place.

Comcast announced a Fastly-powered edge platform integrated across its nationwide network, targeting ultra-low latency services. The company reported new broadband buildouts in Glades County, Florida and Jackson County, Michigan, reaching thousands of previously under-connected locations. Management highlighted AI-focused edge capabilities, including support for streaming, gaming, and emerging AI services delivered closer to end users. The rollout embeds Fastly's software into more than 200 edge compute centers, extending Comcast's Connectivity & Platforms push into broadband innovation, intelligent WiFi, and bundled services. Comcast operates as a global media and technology group, a dual position that lets it test AI-focused connectivity services on its own network footprint while also selling them to customers.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the 15th Five-Year Plan for the development of the information and communications industry, setting the goal of building a new-generation communications network by 2030, with cumulative investment in information infrastructure reaching 3.8 trillion yuan, and the target for intelligent computing power jumping from 1,590 exaflops to 9,800 exaflops. It also proposed launching 6G commercial use at an appropriate time and advancing 6G standard development and technical trials. Driven by this industry catalyst, the Shanghai Composite Index fell 1.18% in the previous trading session, while the communications sector rose 0.63% against the trend. The Southern Fund's Communications ETF saw a turnover rate of 6.93% and turnover of 24 million yuan, while the CSI Communications Services Index it tracks gained 0.63%. At the industry level, institutional data shows that the communications sector rose 73.59% in the first half of 2026, significantly outperforming the CSI 300. Shipments of 800G optical modules continued to expand, and 1.6T entered the early stage of large-scale deployment. Third-party institutions forecast that the global AI optical module market will reach 26 billion US dollars in 2026. In addition, on September 11, the US Federal Communications Commission finalized relevant rules, and several leading domestic optical module makers such as Zhongji Innolight and Eoptolink were not included for the time being, easing overseas policy concerns.

Cloudflare now sees agentic artificial intelligence as a growth opportunity that will dwarf its previous drivers, and has raised its long-term "North Star" growth target to 50% from 40%. Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert, speaking at an investor event, said the company's network architecture is positioned to support low-latency, secure and distributed AI inference workloads, and that Cloudflare expects to exit the year with momentum toward that objective. Demand is showing up through the Workers developer platform, where the company added 2 million developers quarter over quarter, and through variable consumption revenue, with companies including Lovable, Figma, Anthropic and OpenAI building on Workers; Cloudflare estimates that about 80% of significant AI enterprise infrastructure customers use its services. Seifert said Cloudflare is focused on inference rather than training the largest models, and that capital expenditures could rise but any increase would be expected to coincide with higher revenue. The company is also building monetization infrastructure for the agentic economy, including "pay per crawl," a Monetization Gateway, Cloudflare Wallets and identity tools, working with partners including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal and Coinbase, though Seifert acknowledged that significant technical work remains and that Cloudflare cannot yet process transactions at the millions-per-second scale it believes may be necessary.

Nvidia is working with Australian cloud partners on up to 2 gigawatts of AI computing capacity by 2027, expanding the chipmaker's ecosystem beyond selling processors into designing AI factories. The program involves sites designed to host several generations of Nvidia DSX infrastructure, with partners including IREN, Sharon AI, Firmus, ResetData, Megaport, CDC, NEXTDC and AirTrunk. IREN plans to apply the DSX reference architecture across its development portfolio, including its 800-megawatt Bundey campus in South Australia, while Sharon AI plans to deploy up to 68,000 Nvidia GPUs and other partners are preparing data centers, powered shells and connectivity for accelerated computing. Atlassian plans to use Nvidia's Nemotron open models, datasets and tools to customize multimodal applications and enhance Rovo, its workplace AI platform. The 2 gigawatts represents an upper target rather than completed capacity, and partners must still secure power, financing, equipment and customers while meeting construction deadlines.

Comcast and Fastly announced a next-generation content and application delivery partnership that embeds Fastly's programmable edge software into Comcast's edge compute platform, pushing live streaming content closer to customers' homes for millions of Xfinity members. The deployment creates an industry-first hyper-local service layer across Comcast's nationwide network, which includes more than 200 AI-powered, data-processing edge compute centers distributed across the country. Initial results have demonstrated substantial gains in data delivery and significant reductions in round-trip latency compared to traditional content delivery mechanisms, with the platform designed to handle massive live streaming traffic, real-time security, edge compute, and AI services. Elad Nafshi, Chief Network Officer at Comcast, said the stakes will never be higher than during the upcoming fall football season, when a single streaming game can drive record network traffic, and that integrating Fastly establishes a new approach for delivering the biggest moments in streaming. Kip Compton, Chief Executive Officer at Fastly, said extending Fastly's platform into Comcast's network brings more local performance and real-time traffic management to streaming, compute, and security applications while infusing intelligence into the network layer for the AI era.

Cloudflare Inc. raised its long-term growth outlook to 50 percent annually from 40 percent at present, sending its shares up 10.51 percent on Wednesday to close at $10.51 apiece. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026, Chief Finance Officer Thomas Seifert said the company is moving beyond a traditional software-as-a-service model to become an agentic AI platform, and that its future opportunity could be much larger than its business, with revenues projected to grow 36 percent year-on-year. In the second quarter, Cloudflare grew revenues 36 percent to $696.1 million from $512 million a year earlier, while its net loss widened 237 percent to $169.98 million from $50.4 million amid a 206 percent higher operating loss. Earlier this month the company partnered with OpenAI on the early launch of Vulnerability Discovery and Remediation, available in early access through Cloudflare Managed Defense, which CEO Matthew Prince said shifts defense strategy from chasing patches one vulnerability at a time to an automated approach. Institutional interest also rose in the second quarter, with 87 hedge funds holding positions in the stock, up from 84 in the prior quarter, and their combined holdings climbing 11.8 percent to $3.97 billion from $3.55 billion.

Penguin Solutions, Inc. (Nasdaq: PENG) announced it has been selected by Lektra to deploy and optimize its AI micro data centers, supporting Lektra's pioneering distributed cloud network powered entirely by carbon-free energy. Penguin Solutions will provide validated reference designs, AI-optimized compute, and expert services to scale Lektra's EdgeScale AI data centers, which operate at capacities of 20 MW or less and have eight sites already deployed. The collaboration leverages Penguin Solutions' Full-Stack AI Factory Platform, including NVIDIA-based hardware and engineering expertise, to enable incremental GPU capacity expansion for cloud providers and energy hosts. Lektra's CEO Karl Andersen highlighted the partnership's role in advancing distributed energy production, or Grid 2.0, while Penguin Solutions' CEO Kash Shaikh emphasized the need for new deployment approaches as AI demand accelerates.

Sceye, a U.S. aerospace company, announced the successful return of its Service Test 1 (ST1) mission to the United States after a record-breaking trans-Pacific stratospheric flight from New Mexico to Japan and back. The journey, which lasted 30 days and covered nearly 30,000 km, included operating for over a week in Japanese airspace, where Sceye and partner SoftBank Corp. verified Direct-to-Device connectivity to unmodified devices, HAPS-based communications with drones, and edge computing from the stratosphere. ST1 launched on August 9, 2026, arrived in Japan 13 days later, and re-entered the continental U.S. on September 4, 2026, before landing near Sceye's headquarters in Moriarty, New Mexico. The mission demonstrated mobile broadband services including text, voice, internet, and video streaming, and achieved a world-first by installing a mobile core network and web server on a HAPS, cutting latency by over 40% compared to cloud processing. Sceye's platform, designed to cover an area equivalent to about 500 terrestrial towers, marks a milestone toward commercial deployment of stratospheric infrastructure.

Qualcomm shares rose 6.02% intraday after announcing a multi-generation collaboration with Amazon on customized silicon for large-scale AI data centers, focused on inference. The two companies will also work on optical connectivity extending up to 1.6T, leveraging Qualcomm's SerDes and optical DSP technologies to support bandwidth demands inside AWS networks. Qualcomm plans to deepen its use of AWS infrastructure, including Amazon Bedrock, for electronic design automation workloads to shorten chip design cycles. CEO Cristiano Amon said data center infrastructure will require advances in both computing and connectivity. Qualcomm unveiled the Dragonfly C1000 data center CPU in June and said Meta Platforms would use it from 2028 production, while targeting $15 billion in data center sales in fiscal 2029. Neither company disclosed terms for the Amazon arrangement.

Ambarella reported fiscal Q2 revenue of $108.1 million, up 13.2% year-over-year, with non-GAAP EPS of $0.18, and guided fiscal Q3 revenue to a range of $115 million to $124 million, citing favorable seasonality. The company also announced its new X7 stand-alone AI accelerator, now sampling, and two indirect-channel partnerships with CapGemini and a 7-year agreement with Macnica, each expected to contribute about $0.5 billion in revenue over time. Management raised its 5-year rolling serviceable addressable market forecast from $8.5 billion in fiscal year 2027 to $22.9 billion in fiscal year '32, representing a CAGR of about 20%, driven largely by the edge infrastructure opportunity. CFO John Young noted Q2 non-GAAP gross margin of 59.3% and operating expenses of $57.4 million, while CEO Fermi Wang said rising memory costs will be passed to customers to maintain the long-term gross margin target of 59% to 62%. The company also authorized a new $50 million share repurchase program valid through June 30, 2027.