Akamai expands 'World’s Most Distributed' Cloud Network

Akamai Technologies has announced seven upcoming new core compute regions across Europe, Asia, North America, and Latin America. The locations in Amsterdam, Netherlands; Jakarta, Indonesia; Los Angeles, California; Miami, Florida; Milan, Italy; Osaka, Japan; and São Paulo, Brazil, are the third installment of Akamai’s rollout of new core compute regions since its acquisition of Linode last year, and represent a key step in Akamai’s push to redefine how the cloud operates.

With the addition of São Paulo and Miami, Akamai makes it easier for companies to do business in Latin America. The two new core compute regions make Akamai an attractive competitor in a market long dominated by larger hyperscale providers. Akamai’s entry into São Paulo lets customers run workloads in one of the southern hemisphere’s most populated cities and countries, removing a significant economic and performance hurdle that today requires workloads to transit across continents. São Paulo and Miami are representative of Akamai’s push to establish core compute regions in hard-to-access markets around the world, connecting them to the same underlying backbone that powers its edge network today — a massively distributed footprint spanning more than 4,100 edge PoPs across 131 countries.

Akamai is changing how organizations approach cloud architecture, emphasizing a more distributed and decentralized, low-latency, and globally scalable design. Akamai’s cloud computing services are ideal for higher-performance workloads that need to run closer to end users, like those often found in streaming media, gaming, and ecommerce applications. The services are part of Akamai Connected Cloud, a massively distributed edge and cloud platform for cloud computing, security, and content delivery that keeps applications and experiences closer, and threats farther away.

“The need for companies to provide a better user experience increasingly exposes the limits of the legacy centralized cloud model,” said Adam Karon, chief operating officer and general manager, Cloud Technology Group, Akamai. “We’re solving this challenge for customers by flipping the script. With Akamai Connected Cloud, we’re taking an outside-in, distributed-first approach built on a commitment to cloud-native technologies and the same network many of the world’s largest companies have relied on for more than two decades. It’s an approach focused on a future where scale becomes as much about the size of the network as it does the size of the data center.”

Seven New Global Core Compute Regions

The latest batch of strategic new core compute regions will begin to come online and be available to customers throughout September and October. They expand Akamai’s cloud computing network to key data-intensive connection points that will ultimately allow customers to bring improved connectivity and experience to end users. 

• Akamai’s new region in Amsterdam is home to the second-largest internet exchange in the world. It joins Akamai’s recently launched Stockholm region to power customers in northwest Europe with a new level of cloud connectivity.

• The company’s Jakarta region is located in the heart of a nation experiencing a rapidly growing digital economy. Indonesia is anticipated to increase its number of internet users by 36 million by 2028.

• Akamai’s new core compute region in Los Angeles, a leader in the global media and entertainment market, is positioned to expand the company’s robust services in an industry in which for years it has honed considerable expertise and a deep enterprise customer bench.

• The company’s Miami-based core compute region lets the company better serve customers doing business in Latin America, bringing Akamai’s distributed connectivity to a rapidly growing business hub, which has seen an explosion of tech talent and venture capital investment.

• Akamai’s presence in Milan puts a stake in the ground in Italy’s second-largest city. The Italian market for cloud services grew 250% from 2015 to 2022. In addition to serving customers in Europe, the location will also support customers in the Middle East.

• The company’s new Osaka region will connect Japan’s population of 125 million to the massively scalable Akamai backbone. Japan ranks eighth in the world for countries with the largest digital populations. 

• With one of the largest and hardest-to-reach digital populations in Latin America, São Paulo is Akamai’s first core compute region in Latin America, with additional connectivity planned later this year.

“We chose Akamai because of its transparency, performance, and data center deployment. In fact, choosing the most suitable IaaS provider is the most important choice we have made within the company,” said Francesco Masala, CEO, Hyperbit SRLs, an Italian IT solutions provider for small and medium-sized companies. “For us, price–performance ratio is essential, and Akamai succeeds in fully meeting our goals. But what sets Akamai apart is its network. It has been in the game longer than anyone else and has built into its cloud the flexibility and routing we need to deliver our data faster and more efficiently. Because of its scalability and worldwide distribution, we can reach and deliver a better experience to all our customers by providing stable, fast, and reliable service.”

Over the past 90 days, Akamai has opened 13 new core compute regions. Today’s announced regions join existing locations in Atlanta, Dallas, Fremont, Newark, Toronto, Frankfurt, London, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, and recently announced regions in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Paris, Stockholm, Seattle, and Chennai. Akamai plans to roll out more global core compute regions later this year.