Akamai buys Linode for $900m

Combined internet titan plans offerings that do the 'cloud to edge' thing at super-size scale

Internet content delivery concern Akamai has announced it will acquire junior cloud Linode for about $900m.

Linode positions itself as a cloud built by, and for, developers, and offers hyperscale services at prices that undercut larger cloud providers. The American-based biz operates eleven data centers spread across America, Canada, Germany, the UK, India, Japan, Singapore, and Australia.

Akamai CEO and co-founder Dr Tom Leighton said the acquisition will mean the corporation he leads can handle workloads that span all environments from the cloud to the edge, and suggested developers will enjoy working with a combined cloud and content delivery network to test and deploy such applications.

In a blog post, Linode founder and CEO Christopher Aker described a "natural synergy between Akamai and Linode."

"The marriage of Linode's compute and storage products with Akamai's serverless, CDN, and security solutions, will give customers a broader range of services to build, modernize, and scale the next generation of applications," he opined.

A slide used in the deck [PDF] shown to Akamai investors put some meat on the bones of those utterances, suggesting the merged companies' e-commerce clients might appreciate the chance to combine managed databases at Linode with Akamai's personal data processing tools, or a metaverse operator could use distributed GPUs hosted at Linode and Akamai's private backbone to deliver a virtual reality experience to any device.

Aker said the deal will change nothing for Linode users, but in time the company will "offer entirely new products, services, expertise, locations, and scale, while Akamai will be able to tap into Linode's deep expertise in compute, storage, and on-demand infrastructure-as-a-service."

The deal is expected to close in Q1 2022 – a swift timeframe that reflects Linode's private ownership and senior executive enthusiasm for the deal.

The acquisition was announced alongside Akamai's Q4 results, which produced revenue of $905m – up seven per cent year-over-year, and net income of $161m – a 42 per cent jump.

Akamai was especially keen to point out that its security-related services saw a 23 per cent year-on-year revenue climb, to $365m for the quarter. For the full year, revenue was $3.5bn, representing an eight per cent improvement. Full-year net income of $652m was a 17 per cent jump over 2020's result.

Acquiring Linode is forecast to add $100m to FY2022 revenue for Akamai. ®