Akamai Signals Next Growth Chapter in Asia Bringing AI Closer to Businesses

Akamai Technologies crossed $1 billion in annual revenue in Asia Pacific (APAC) for 2025, marking a turning point for the company’s regional business as it sharpens its focus toward enabling the next wave of artificial intelligence (AI) deployment closer to end users.

With more than two decades of expertise in APAC, Akamai continues to see distinct growth opportunities in the region. This milestone is a launchpad for its next phase of growth — centered on helping enterprises operationalize AI, particularly through inference at the edge, where speed and proximity increasingly determine competitive advantage.

The strategy is led by Sean Li, Senior Vice President of Sales and Managing Director, Asia Pacific region, who was recently appointed to oversee the region. Under his leadership, the APAC business is evolving to meet the needs of enterprises looking to operationalize AI.

“APAC is moving beyond AI experimentation to execution,” said Li. “The real challenge now is making AI work in live environments — where latency, scale, and reliability directly impact revenue and the customer experience. By bringing inference to the edge, we are giving enterprises a platform to deploy intelligence instantly, securely, and at a scale that centralized clouds simply cannot match."

From AI Ambition to AI Execution

Across APAC, enterprises are accelerating AI adoption, but many are encountering a common constraint: traditional cloud architectures were not built for real-time inference at scale.

Akamai is targeting this gap by running AI workloads on the one of the world’s most distributed cloud platforms, bringing GPU-powered compute closer to users and data to deliver real-time AI experiences such as recommendation engines, live video intelligence, autonomous vehicles, assistive agents, and high resolution video workflows.

This shift reflects a broader industry transition from centralized model training to distributed inference, where milliseconds can determine outcomes in customer engagement, operational efficiency, and risk management.

“Akamai’s advantage is not just in powering applications, but in where we power them,” Li said. “By bringing cloud and inference closer to the point of interaction, we help customers move faster, respond in real time, and deliver better experiences at scale.”

A Region Driving the Next Wave of Infrastructure Demand

APAC’s diversity is emerging as a catalyst for innovation rather than a barrier. Mature markets such as Japan and Australia are increasingly adopting managed infrastructure models to improve performance and resilience, while fast-growing economies across India, China, and Southeast Asia are producing a new generation of AI-native companies built for speed and scale. Korea, in particular, is reflecting both trends, with established enterprises modernizing legacy systems and digital-first players pushing the boundaries of AI-driven services.

These dynamics are reshaping infrastructure requirements across the region, driving demand for distributed platforms that can operate consistently across fragmented regulatory environments, varied network conditions, and rapidly evolving user expectations.

Accelerating Inference

Akamai’s next phase in APAC will focus on unlocking AI from centralized data centers by bringing GPU-powered inference closer to users and data across its global network and embedding security — including AI application and workload protection — directly into the infrastructure, eliminating the trade-off between performance and protection.

“This milestone reflects the trust customers have placed in us over the past two decades,” Li said. “But the bigger opportunity lies ahead. As AI reshapes how businesses operate, Akamai is architecting the intelligent infrastructure required for the agentic web, helping companies build systems that don’t just work in theory — but perform under real-world conditions.”