Cybersecurity and cloud computing firm Akamai’s stock jumped shortly after the opening bell.

The firm revealed a $1.8 billion deal with a “leading frontier model provider” on Thursday.

The company’s cloud business is growing rapidly as it positions itself as a key provider of AI infrastructure.

Akamai’s stock jumped Friday after it published a $1.8 billion deal with an AI firm and posted first-quarter earnings that were in line with estimates.

A “leading frontier model provider” has committed to $1.8 billion over seven years for cloud infrastructure services, Akamai’s CEO Tom Leighton remarked in the press release Thursday. He did not name the provider.

The American cybersecurity and cloud computing firm reported Thursday that first-quarter revenue rose 6% to over $1 billion.

The company’s cloud infrastructure services revenue jumped 40% to $95 million, and security revenue was up 11% to $590 million. Meanwhile, its delivery and other cloud applications revenue fell 7% to $389 million in the quarter.

Akamai mentioned it expects revenue in the second quarter of between $1.08 billion and $.1.1 billion and adjusted net income per share between $1.45 and $1.65.

“We operate the world’s most distributed platform, and we have our infrastructure in 4,300 places, 700 cities in 130 countries, and we’ve used that for delivering content and for providing security to intercept all the attacks, and now we’re using it to support AI so our customers, agents and AI apps can run right near their users, and the data provide a much faster experience,” Leighton told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday.

Inference cloud

The enterprise has been scaling its cloud infrastructure business to meet rising demand for AI workloads and carve a name for itself alongside leading AI model developers like OpenAI and Anthropic, Akamai’s Chief Innovation Officer Robert Blumofe told CNBC last week.

Blumofe explained that the business has three key pillars: content delivery, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure services.

“The third pillar of our business, which is more recent, is what we call cloud infrastructure services… and that’s actually the fastest growing part of our business, though it’s the smallest of the three,” Blumofe commented.

He added that Akamai already runs an AI-operated inference cloud which provides computing power, data storage, and the tools needed to run AI applications.

It currently operates in several locations where it can secure strong connections to users. The organization plans to expand further and improve how it manages resources across its network.

“I think we’ve been undervalued for a while, and investors have been looking for some real validation that our different approach is going to pay off, and now we’re getting that validation, and we have a very strong pipeline of major enterprise customers, including some that have very large cloud needs,” Leighton told CNBC on Friday. This also touches on aspects of portfolio.

“We’re going to be in a great position to enable and secure the recent AI economy.”

— CNBC’s April Roach helped contribute to this report.