Jim Cramer Calls Akamai a Bargain AI Play After $11.6 Billion Anthropic Contract

On CNBC's "Mad Money," Jim Cramer highlighted Akamai Technologies ($AKAM) as an overlooked and undervalued way to invest in artificial intelligence following Anthropic's $11.6 billion, seven-year infrastructure commitment. Cramer estimated the contract generates roughly $1.66 billion annually—representing more than a third of Akamai's projected revenue this year—and described the stock's post-announcement pullback as a clear buying opportunity.
The thesis centers on the surge in automated traffic driven by AI agents. With autonomous bots multiplying search, browsing, and comparison tasks across the web, network infrastructure demands are accelerating. Akamai is expanding its Inference Cloud across distributed edge data centers to process workloads closer to end users, positioning the company to capture rising inference demand.
While near-term capital expenditures and buildout costs pressured Q2 non-GAAP operating margins down five percentage points to 25%, Cramer argued that the market has already priced in the near-term pain. $AKAM trades at approximately 16 times current-year earnings estimates—compared to roughly 279 times for Cloudflare and over 50 times for Fastly—allowing investors to effectively acquire the Anthropic partnership without paying a premium.