Every technological revolution begins with a moment of centralization. In the early days, factories huddled along rivers, drawn by the irresistible pull of water power. Electrical grids transformed entire economies, funneling energy into a handful of industrial hubs. The film industry followed a similar path, channeling vast sums of capital into marquee studios and their tightly controlled distribution networks. Even content and security started off centralized.
Yet, in every case, each of these systems eventually shifted toward decentralization:
Local power generation supplanted the dominance of regional monopolies.
Streaming services disrupted the traditional theater model, bringing entertainment directly into our homes.
Information and media moved closer to the edge, where audiences live and work, making news and entertainment more accessible and immediate.
Content moved closer to users and security moved to the cloud to stop attacks locally before they could gang up on their target.
Today’s AI inflection point
AI has reached a similar inflection point. It will not — it cannot — scale by doing more of the same. As an industry, we’ve become fixated on building ever-larger models in ever-larger data centers. Every headline trumpets billion-dollar contracts, data center campuses measured in gigawatts, and record-breaking clusters of GPUs. But bigger isn’t better. Not any more.
Centralization has become a constraint. Every request sent across continents wastes precious cycles, power, and money. Latency cripples user experience in trades, payments, games, and conversations. Power grids groan under the strain. Companies spend billions to train models, only to find that egress costs and seconds of delay render them impractical at scale.
Tomorrow’s inference explosion
The rise of intelligent agents, autonomous systems, and physical AI will trigger an inference explosion that dwarfs human-initiated requests by orders of magnitude. Every autonomous vehicle, robot, and smart system will become a persistent consumer of distributed edge inference, supplementing their local compute the way every smartphone today streams video it could never store locally.
Centralization, though, isn’t the only constraint. Today, AI is held back by fears that it’s not ready for prime time.
Will the answers be accurate, or will the model hallucinate?
Will the experience be responsive, or will latency break the flow?
Will the economics work, or will inference bills bury the business case?
Will it run reliably, or will it fail in production when it matters most?
AI is breaking the decades-old cloud model as companies run up against rising inference costs and latency issues. CFOs are pushing back — and CIOs are quietly rebalancing workloads, doing everything they can to get closer to where data and users actually are. The bottleneck isn’t GPUs. It’s proximity.
It’s time to break the mold
Today, we announced Akamai Inference Cloud, a platform that redefines where and how AI is used by expanding inference from core data centers to the edge of the internet.
Built with NVIDIA, Akamai Inference Cloud combines Akamai’s expertise in globally distributed architectures with NVIDIA Blackwell AI infrastructure and AI leadership to radically rethink and extend the systems needed to unlock AI's true potential.
Unlike traditional systems this platform is purpose-built to provide low-latency, real-time edge AI processing on a global scale by placing NVIDIA’s accelerated computing infrastructure closer to where data is created and decisions need to be made.
Intelligence that closes the distance
For decades, technology has rewarded companies that could build larger data centers, manage massive datasets, and tighten their hold on compute and data. That era produced remarkable power, but it also produced distance between data and people, and between innovation and access.
Now, the advantage belongs to those who can close that distance. Intelligence that operates closer to where it is needed will be more valuable than anything locked away in a distant data center.
Bring the future closer with Akamai
AI is redefining cloud infrastructure, shifting focus from power to proximity, from megawatts to milliseconds. And nobody is more positioned to help customers navigate that shift than Akamai. We’re not waiting for the future to arrive. We’re bringing that future closer.
Learn more
Our official press release announced the Akamai Inference Cloud launch, and this blog post by Akamai’s Senior Vice President of Products, Jon Alexander, provides a deeper look at the work behind it. For even more information on Akamai Inference Cloud, please visit our website.
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