Akamai acquires Fermyon to drive serverless edge computing

Cloud and security company Akamai Technologies has announced the acquisition of Fermyon, a specialist in serverless WebAssembly technology. With this acquisition, the tech giant aims to strengthen its cloud platform at the edge – the edge of the network – to better meet the growing demand for AI applications. Fermyon is a pioneer in WebAssembly (Wasm), a technology that enables highly efficient and secure code execution in cloud environments. By integrating Fermyon’s Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) technology into Akamai’s global network, companies can run applications closer to the end user. The acquisition comes at a strategic time. According to Akamai, the AI ​​inference market (executing AI models) is increasingly shifting from central data centers to the edge. “Fermyon’s FaaS capabilities, combined with Akamai’s cloud, will make it even easier for developers to innovate and execute lightweight code at the edge,” said Adam Karon, chief operating officer and general manager, Cloud Technology Group, Akamai Technologies. “As Akamai continues to expand compute from core data centers to the edge of the internet, this technology will give developers a broad continuum of cloud native and serverless options to build and deploy their next great application.” Fermyon is a leader in both serverless functions and WebAssembly and is active in the open-source community. The company maintains the Spin and SpinKube Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) open-source projects and is a member of the Bytecode Alliance, all activities that Akamai will continue to support. Further, Fermyon’s employees, including co-founders Matt Butcher and Radu Matei, will join Akamai’s Cloud Technology Group and continue to champion Fermyon’s open-source project leadership and create the next generation of serverless technologies. In addition, by acquiring Fermyon, Akamai plans to deepen the integration between the edge functions platform and its performance and security products. The resulting cloud computing platform aims to make it even faster and easier for developers to build, deploy, and secure applications at the edge that outperform cloud-native applications for less money the same way they can in core data centers today. Akamai anticipates no material impact to the company’s financial guidance for 2025 as a result of the transaction.