Sean Sharpe
Catalyst Swing Trader, Author of Stocks in Play Newsletter
The foundational AI software and digital infrastructure layer is likely the next group of early winners, because the hardware side is already appreciated and the digital layer much less so. Fastly was the canary in the coal mine; Twilio, Bandwidth, Datadog and Cloudflare are the other likely winners. x.comÂ
Agentic AI and the infrastructure supporting it is the main market theme right now. Fastly, Cloudflare, Akamai and DigitalOcean are the closest to pure plays on the rise of agentic AI, with Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco also positioned on the infrastructure side. x.com x.comÂ
Akamai trades on much more reasonable multiples than some peers, and growth in inference and security may let the stock work from here. The Anthropic deal is a nice reference win, though the core CDN business will probably keep bleeding share. x.comÂ
Fastly's overall offering falls far short of Cloudflare's, and the market has already rewarded the strongest cybersecurity players. Fastly is a more modern CDN than Akamai and has some cybersecurity exposure. Buying is off the table for now, though if forced to buy one stock, Fastly would probably be the pick. x.comÂ
Akamai has catching up to do as an edge-network play on AI agents, with an overlooked AI-agent security angle. AI agents and LLMs constantly fetch data from websites and APIs, which needs fast edge networks; since that call, Akamai is up 20% versus Fastly's 48%. Its CFO recently discussed agentic security and shopping, and said a four-year, $600 million GPU deal with a US robotics-focused company lifts major wins to over $2.8 billion this year. Robots could be the leg to new highs. x.com x.com … Show more
DigitalOcean adds a concrete growth driver to the AI-agent basket. Per a firm the author quotes, it is focusing on the AI-optimized segment, growing at a 110% compound annual rate versus 25% for broader infrastructure-as-a-service. The basket holds pure plays: Circle and Coinbase for USDC machine payments and rails, DigitalOcean for AI website hosting, Fastly and Akamai for API calls and Cloudflare for edge computing. Amazon and Microsoft are less pure plays. x.com x.com x.comÂ
Cloudflare's business outlook looks very bullish, but the stock needs to fall back below $200 before even a small position makes sense. Cloudflare sees a need for a payment processor that can handle millions or tens of millions of transactions per second to support microtransactions on the agentic web, and its recent fireside chat was very bullish. x.com x.comÂ
Akamai's completed acquisition of LayerX, a secure enterprise browser provider, deepens its AI usage-control and workforce security strategy and is fueling momentum. The stock broke out of a falling wedge, closing at $126.57 on a volume spike after basing near $113.57, now support, with targets of $137.93 and $149.76. Institutional filings lean toward buyers: 7 increased and 1 new versus 6 decreased and 1 closed. x.comÂ
Akamai is an overlooked AI inference play because its 4,400 points of presence already have power contracts while power is the bottleneck. Seen as a legacy CDN, Akamai can quickly install Nvidia workstation-level GPUs across that network, offering low-latency edge compute cheaper than hyperscalers and suited to enterprise agentic workflows. CDN pricing is also rising as Limelight/Edgio, Lumen and Stackpath exit, yet the stock trades at 12.5 times forward EPS amid a compute shortage. x.com x.com … Show more
Cloudflare's valuation, about 28.5x EV/ARR and 453x run-rate GAAP EBIT, leaves little room for its competitive risks. Its SASE and developer-platform businesses face Zscaler, Palo Alto and hyperscalers with far bigger budgets, and OpenAI and Anthropic may keep inference on their own backends. The bull case is crisp and arguably priced in: bot security and edge workloads matter more as agents spread, growth sped up from 27% to 34%, and weekly agent requests doubled in January. x.comÂ
Akamai's 7-year, $11.6B cloud deal with Anthropic turns it from an old CDN into an AI inference cloud for one of the biggest AI labs. The deal, expandable to about $20B, is six times May's $1.8B Anthropic contract, previously its biggest ever. Management sees about a $1.7B annual run rate by end-2028, versus $99M for the whole cloud unit last quarter. Anthropic's warrants for up to 5% of Akamai at $111.33 vest only if it spends more. If a fifth wave is underway, the June highs are back in play. … Show more