Citi Stays Neutral on Fastly After 14% AI Surge, Backs Cloudflare Instead

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.