Akamai Technologies (AKAM) | CompanyGraph

Akamai Technologies (AKAM) | CompanyGraph

How does this company make money?

Customers pay per gigabyte of data the company delivers on their behalf. They also pay a monthly fee for security services like DDoS protection. Companies that run computing tasks at the network's edge are billed based on how many compute cycles and how much bandwidth they consume.

What makes this company hard to replace?

Switching to a different CDN is not a simple procurement decision — it requires engineering work. Customer applications have DNS CNAME records hard-coded to point traffic at this company's specific edge servers, so redirecting to a rival means rewriting application code and re-testing every integration. On top of that, the traffic routing algorithms have been trained on years of data about each customer's specific content patterns, and a new provider would have to start that learning process from scratch.

What limits this company?

The racks inside carrier-neutral internet exchange points like DE-CIX Frankfurt and Equinix facilities are physically finite, and the tenants already inside hold long-term contracts on the best spots. Every time the company wants to expand into a new city, it has to negotiate a separate deal for whatever space remains — there is no way to buy that access in bulk or speed the process up.

What does this company depend on?

The company cannot operate without peering agreements with major ISPs like Verizon and AT&T, rack space leases at internet exchange points including DE-CIX Frankfurt and Equinix facilities, transit capacity from backbone providers, BGP routing table access from regional network operators, and reliable power and cooling at its distributed edge locations.

Who depends on this company?

E-commerce platforms like Shopify rely on it because page load delays beyond 3 seconds measurably cut checkout conversions. Live streaming services depend on it because any buffering causes viewers to leave immediately. Gaming companies need it because multiplayer games become unplayable when latency climbs above 150ms. Enterprise software companies rely on it because slow application response times directly hurt employee productivity.

How does this company scale?

Software — the traffic routing algorithms and the cached copies of content — can be copied onto servers in a new city at almost no extra cost. What does not scale easily is getting into that new city in the first place: each location requires its own facility access negotiation, power provisioning, and peering deal with the local ISP. Those steps cannot be automated or bought in bulk.

What external forces can significantly affect this company?

Data sovereignty laws like China's Cybersecurity Law can force local content hosting, which breaks the global routing model the company is built on. Submarine cable cuts caused by ship anchors or earthquakes push traffic onto slower overland paths. IPv4 address exhaustion is making it more expensive to secure the routing table positions the network depends on.

Where is this company structurally vulnerable?

If a government passes a rule like China's Cybersecurity Law — which requires content to be stored and served within that country's own borders — traffic in that jurisdiction gets forced onto state-controlled routing paths. That breaks the direct peering connections the whole system depends on, erasing the speed advantage in that region and punching a hole in the coordinated 1,000-city network.