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Akamai is up 26% in premarket trading Friday after the company announced a major cloud infrastructure deal tied to AI, helping investors look past modestly better-than-expected Q1 results and a weaker-than-expected Q2 outlook.

In a press release Thursday after the bell, the cloud and cybersecurity company said it had secured a $1.8 billion, seven-year commitment from a “leading frontier model provider” for Akamai’s cloud infrastructure services, a deal CEO Tom Leighton said strengthened the company’s position as a “key infrastructure provider in the AI economy.”

The announcement came alongside Akamai’s Q1 earnings, which were only modestly ahead of Wall Street expectations. Adjusted earnings came in at $1.61 per share, slightly above analysts’ estimate of $1.60 per share compiled by FactSet. Revenue rose 6% year on year to $1.074 billion, broadly in-line with Wall Street's forecasts.

The company said growth was led by its cloud infrastructure services, where revenue jumped 40% year on year. Security revenue grew 11%, while delivery and other cloud applications revenue dropped 7%.

For the current quarter, the company forecast adjusted earnings per share of $1.45 to $1.65, with the midpoint falling short of the $1.68 expected, and revenue of $1.075 billion to $1.1 billion also below the $1.104 billion estimate at the midpoint, according to FactSet.

Another day, another massive Nvidia warrants deal in the AI ecosystem.

Shares of data center company IREN spiked 20% in postmarket trading after it reached a pact with the chip designer to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of its AI offerings across data centers.

This means that IREN will effectively be building out data centers designed by Nvidia to optimize for its hardware. And some of that hardware deployed will seemingly then be utilized by Nvidia: IREN also announced a $3.4 billion AI cloud contract with the giant on Thursday.

As part of the arrangement, IREN issued Nvidia warrants that expire in five years that enable the company to buy up to 30 million shares at $70 apiece. If fully exercised, that would amount to a $2.1 billion investment into IREN.

This announcement took the sting out of IREN’s Q3 results, which saw the firm report sales of $144.8 million (compared to analyst estimates of $216.6 million) and adjusted EBITDA of $59.5 million (estimate: $125 million).

On Wednesday, Nvidia announced an investment of $500 million in fiber-optics firm Corning to accelerate its manufacturing capacity.

Applied Optoelectronics tumbled after-hours after the connectivity company reported lower-than-expected Q1 sales and underwhelming revenue guidance.

Here are the numbers:

• Revenue of $151.1 million (compared to analyst estimates of $157.5 million).

• An adjusted loss per share of $0.07 (estimate: a $0.05 loss).

• An adjusted gross margin of 29.1% (estimate: 30.37%).

The company helps servers in large-scale data centers relay information, partnering with companies like Microsoft and Amazon. Last month, the stock surged after news broke that a key hyperscale customer, following an initial order, had significantly increased its demand for AAOI’s offerings.

For second quarter of 2026, the company expects:

• Revenue in the range of $180 million to $198 million (estimate: $196.83 million).

• Adjusted gross margin in the range of 29% to 30% (estimate: 31.42%).

In the press release, AAOI Chief Financial and Strategy Officer Dr. Stefan Murry said:

“Our focus remains on ramping our capacity thoughtfully to meet the unprecedented demand and are confident in our ability to execute on our ambitious growth plans, while ensuring reliability, quality, and a dedication to excellence.”

Demand for photonics does not seem to be in question, but judging by Lumentum’s post-earnings call on Tuesday and Applied Optoelectronics’ commentary, the challenge lies in securing supply.

AAOI was up nearly 300% since the beginning of the year before this print.