Internet Services & Infrastructure

Akamai Technologies announced an approximately $11.6 billion agreement supporting Anthropic's central processing unit workloads, a deal that also provides for a potential additional $9 billion in business beyond the initial commitment. On Mad Money, Jim Cramer said the seven-year contractual commitment works out to $1.66 billion per year, more than a third of what Akamai is expected to bring in this year, though the annual figure is a simple average and Akamai's filing specifies separate seven-year project terms beginning on their respective service start dates, with payments subject to delivery and availability requirements. Akamai estimates approximately $5.5 billion in capital expenditures related to the Anthropic commitment, including an additional approximately $1.7 billion in 2026, and left its 2026 revenue guidance unchanged while issuing an Anthropic warrant covering up to approximately 5% of its outstanding common stock. In the second quarter, Akamai's cloud infrastructure services revenue rose 39% year over year to approximately $99 million and security revenue rose 10% to approximately $604 million, helping total revenue grow 5% to approximately $1.1 billion, while delivery and other cloud applications revenue declined 6% and adjusted earnings per share fell 8% to $1.59. Cramer, who highlighted Akamai's distributed Akamai Inference Cloud initiative and its edge computing approach, said the stock's retreat after the announcement felt like a buying opportunity, noting it trades at approximately 16.6x forward earnings, below Fastly's approximately 48x multiple.

Zscaler announced a collaboration with IBM and Red Hat to protect private applications during the window between vulnerability disclosure and patch deployment. The collaboration combines Zscaler Autonomous Application Shield, delivered through the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange security platform, with Lightwell from IBM and Red Hat to provide adaptive, application-specific protection alongside validated software remediation in a single coordinated response. Zscaler cited Mandiant's M-Trends 2026 report, which found the mean time to exploit a vulnerability has fallen below zero, meaning vulnerabilities are increasingly exploited before a public patch exists. Under the arrangement, Zscaler App Connectors continuously assess each private application's exposure points and vulnerabilities, adaptive protections are applied inline in real time when a new vulnerability emerges, and Lightwell then provides validated remediations for affected open source software. Joby Menon, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Zscaler, said the collaboration brings together inline, application-specific protection and validated remediation to help customers reduce risk during that gap, while Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager of Lightwell at Red Hat, said AI is shrinking the exploitation window from months or weeks to hours and minutes. Autonomous Application Shield is currently available through an Early Access Program, and Zscaler said availability, capabilities, and timing of the collaboration are subject to change.

Nvidia's board authorized an additional $150B for its existing share-repurchase program, bringing the remaining authorization to $235B, which the company said was the largest increase to a share-repurchase authorization in history. Micron Technology reported fiscal fourth-quarter results and guidance that topped Wall Street's expectations by a wide margin, earning an adjusted $33.42 per share as revenue soared 379.1% year-over-year to $54.23B, versus analyst expectations of $31.72 per share on $51.49B in revenue. Accenture shares rose after its Q4 beat expectations and it forecast upbeat fiscal 2027 revenue growth, reporting GAAP earnings of $3.29 per share, revenue up 6.3% year over year to $18.7B, and new bookings of $22.2B. MongoDB shares fell after CEO Chirantan Desai stepped down effective immediately to become the newly created Chief Enterprise Platform Officer at Meta, with the board appointing Dev Ittycheria as interim president and CEO. Summit Therapeutics shares surged after AstraZeneca announced a $2B equity investment in the U.S. biotech and a clinical collaboration to develop new cancer treatments, purchasing convertible preferred shares at a conversion price equivalent to $18.36 per common share, a 10% premium to Summit's five-day volume-weighted average price. For the week, the Dow fell 1.26%, the S&P 500 lost 0.27%, and the Nasdaq Composite climbed 0.45%.

Pony.ai and its Croatian partner Verne have launched fully driverless robotaxi trials in Zagreb, the company's first such deployment in Europe. The service runs on public roads in Croatia's capital and is integrated with the Uber app for ride hailing. The Zagreb launch extends Pony.ai's autonomous ride service beyond its existing markets and gives the company a live European proof point for its joint deployment model, in which partners fund fleets while Pony.ai concentrates on Level 4 software and operations. Pony.ai, a US based software group focused on autonomous mobility in China and overseas, has a market cap of $2.8b, placing it in the mid sized bracket of global automation players. Investors can watch upcoming disclosures on paid ride volumes, fleet count and contribution margins from joint deployments like Zagreb to see whether unit economics in new cities start to resemble improving metrics already reported in Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

UBS said it sees the artificial intelligence infrastructure market staying hot, keeping CoreWeave in focus on Friday. In a note to clients, UBS analyst Karl Keirstead wrote that the per-hour price of hosted Nvidia GPUs is rising, that the environment is inflationary, and that revenue-per-gigawatt figures are moving higher, now a key pillar of the hyperscaler and neo-cloud bull case. Keirstead noted that CoreWeave disclosed this week it raised per-hour GPU pricing across all SKUs by 25% in July 2026 and has since raised them by another 10% in just the last two to three months. He also flagged the risk that local community and state and local government pushback could throttle the pace of AI data center additions, though he said checks suggested the industry will manage through the hurdle. Keirstead added that the availability and cost of capital could slow the AI buildout, with some projects expected to fade, but said better-positioned players including CoreWeave will not have an issue.

BigBear.ai Holdings reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $36.7 million, up 13% year over year, while gross margin rose 781 basis points to 32.8% on a higher contribution from generative AI platforms and products. The margin gain has not yet carried through to adjusted EBITDA, which was negative $11.6 million versus negative $8.5 million a year earlier, as increased investment in sales, go-to-market capabilities and research and development offset the gross-margin benefit. The company ended the quarter with $410 million in cash and investments to fund that continued spending. BigBear.ai competes with Palantir Technologies and C3.ai in mission-focused and government AI applications, and the balance between revenue growth, gross-margin expansion and operating expenses will determine whether the improving margin profile translates into stronger adjusted EBITDA.

CoreWeave announced availability of the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, with Cognition as its first production customer, alongside new support for the NVIDIA Vera CPU. Cognition, which uses CoreWeave for training, reinforcement learning and inference, reported that the Vera Rubin NVL72 delivered up to 4.8x higher total token throughput for SWE-2 inference workloads versus a GB200 NVL72 baseline and 3.8x higher output-token throughput for reinforcement-learning workloads. CoreWeave said a Vera rack can contain 128 CPUs and 11,264 cores, theoretically supporting more than 11,000 concurrent isolated environments, and that testing showed more than three times faster agent sandbox startup times compared with an x86 CPU. The company will offer Vera on bare metal using the same operating model and economics as the rest of its infrastructure, aiming to monetize CPU-intensive infrastructure alongside accelerator hours. CoreWeave remains heavily dependent on NVIDIA's technology roadmap and faces competition from hyperscalers and specialized GPU clouds including Microsoft Azure and Nebius Group N.V., which closed four deals in the quarter averaging more than $1 billion each and plans roughly £1.7 billion in U.K. AI compute expansion expected to deliver 65 MW when fully operational in 2027.

Zscaler shares have returned +11.8% over the past month, outpacing the Zacks S&P 500 composite's +0.6% change, while the Zacks Security industry gained 14.6% over the same period. The cloud-based information security provider is expected to post earnings of $1.16 per share for the current quarter, a year-over-year change of +20.8%, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate has changed +678.7% over the last 30 days. For the current fiscal year, the consensus earnings estimate of $4.91 indicates a year-over-year change of +16.6%, and for the next fiscal year the consensus estimate of $5.54 indicates a change of +12.9%. Consensus sales estimates stand at $937.61 million for the current quarter, $3.93 billion for the current fiscal year and $4.55 billion for the next fiscal year, indicating year-over-year changes of +19%, +17.2% and +15.8%, respectively. Zscaler reported revenues of $898.18 million in the last reported quarter, a year-over-year change of +24.9%, with EPS of $1.19 versus $0.89 a year ago, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $877.14 million by +2.4% on revenue and by +9.17% on EPS. Zscaler is rated Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) and is graded F on the Zacks Value Style Score, indicating it trades at a premium to its peers.

S&P Dow Jones Indices announced a series of benchmark rebalancings on Thursday afternoon, effective prior to the market open on Tuesday, Oct. 6. Cloud communications software maker Twilio Inc Class A will join the flagship S&P 500, moving up from the S&P MidCap 400, replacing Warner Bros Discovery Inc, which is being acquired by S&P 500 constituent Paramount Skydance Corp in a deal nearing final completion. Twilio shares rose 1.6% in extended trading, while semiconductor test equipment producer FormFactor Inc will fill Twilio's former spot in the S&P MidCap 400 as it shifts up from the S&P SmallCap 600. The small-cap benchmark will in turn absorb SaaS platform Workiva Inc, which replaces FormFactor and gained 2.7% after-hours. In a separate structural shift, newly formed Consumer Staples entity Vylor Inc. joined the S&P 500 on Thursday following its spinoff from Corteva Inc, which will transition into the S&P MidCap 400 on Oct. 6, taking the spot of Olin Corporation; Olin moves to the S&P SmallCap 600 to replace chipmaker Qorvo Inc, which is being acquired by Skyworks Solutions Inc in a pending transaction that prompted the chain of small-cap reallocations.

Zscaler released its ThreatLabz 2026 Ransomware Report on 1 October 2026, detailing new attack patterns including large-scale AI-driven ransomware operations that automate intrusion, data theft, and victim targeting. Researchers reported a rise in executive-focused data theft and misuse of enterprise tools such as Microsoft Teams to gain access. The report reinforces Zscaler's narrative that AI-driven threats are expanding and that security budgets are shifting toward Zero Trust and data protection, though it does not address whether the company can convert that awareness into larger multi-year contracts and improved net retention without higher sales and operating costs. Investors will be watching how management frames AI ransomware trends at the October 6, 2026 Investor Day and whether disclosures around Z-Flex, Security for AI, and Agentic SecOps show measurable traction in annual recurring revenue and product adoption within Global 2000 accounts.

CoreWeave, Inc. CRWV is expanding its AI cloud ecosystem through the launch of the CoreWeave Partner Network and a new customer deployment with Ennoble Care. The Partner Network brings together technology integrations validated on CoreWeave Cloud under production conditions, including collaborations with VAST Data, CrowdStrike, Reflection and ClickHouse, among others, covering infrastructure, data services, software, security, models and inference. The network is also expanding into tools used by AI agents, starting with search, with Exa, Parallel Web Systems and You.com joining to give agents built on CoreWeave access to a shared search layer through a single integration. Separately, Ennoble Care selected CoreWeave to support clinical AI inference workloads across its home-based care network, deploying NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition nodes through CoreWeave Kubernetes Service with reserved GPU capacity, managed Kubernetes, hardware-enforced isolation, zero-trust controls and direct access to CoreWeave specialists. CoreWeave stated that CKS provides eight to 10 times faster container spin-up times than a general-purpose cloud alternative, and highlighted its MLPerf inference and training results along with three consecutive Platinum rankings in SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX.

CoreWeave unveiled Forge, a unified AI development environment, at its Fully Connected AI cloud conference. The company also introduced the CoreWeave Partner Network, featuring validated technology integrations aimed at enterprise and advanced AI users, and expanded its compute lineup by adding the NVIDIA Vera CPU to support emerging AI agent workloads. CoreWeave runs cloud infrastructure for AI developers and enterprises, and the launch sequence signals how the US-based provider is trying to pull more of the AI build process onto its own stack. The company said the clearest test of the strategy will be future disclosures tying Forge and the Partner Network to measurable backlog or workload share, such as updated figures on how much of its contracted AI capacity is running through Forge-driven workflows in quarterly updates through 2027.

Akamai Technologies completed the first-ever clean energy transaction executed on a CFTC-registered exchange, securing a high-impact solar Virtual Power Purchase Agreement on August 31, 2026 on Resurety's CleanTrade marketplace. The transaction supports Akamai's 2030 goal of reaching net-zero emissions across its global platform and operations. Akamai selected an Indiana-based solar project of almost 200MW expected to generate over 400,000 MWh annually, where each MWh of clean energy displaces approximately 540 kg of CO2 per MWh, compared with around 350 kg of CO2 per MWh for projects in higher-renewable regions such as Texas. Resurety's CleanTrade is the first and only marketplace registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for transacting clean energy on an as-produced basis. Akamai's Global Head of Corporate Sustainability and ESG Officer Mike Mattera called it the fastest VPPA Akamai has ever completed, and Resurety Co-Founder and CEO Lee Taylor said CleanTrade removes common friction points and empowers corporate buyers of every scale to execute deals quickly. Akamai is set to leverage CleanTrade for additional VPPA transactions.

Shopify's Merchant Solutions revenues jumped 37% year over year to $2.78 billion in the second quarter of 2026, representing 78% of total revenues, as overall Gross Merchandise Value climbed 32% to $115.6 billion. Shopify Payments remained the biggest driver, with payments penetration reaching 68% of GMV, up from 64% a year earlier, while GMV processed through Shopify Payments rose 38% to $78.1 billion from $56.6 billion, generating an additional $624 million in Shopify Payments revenues. Shopify Payments is now available in 40 countries following its launch in the UAE, European penetration increased more than 350 basis points year over year, and Shop Pay GMV rose 53% year over year, while international GMV increased 37%, offline GMV rose 32% and B2B GMV surged 76%. The company faces tough competition from Block and PayPal, whose Braintree platform and Square ecosystem are pushing into larger sellers and the mid-market. Shopify shares have lost 7.9% year to date, underperforming the broader Zacks Computer and Technology sector's return of 21.3%, and the stock carries a forward 12-month price/sales of 10.65X versus the sector's 6.14X. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2026 earnings stands at $1.89 per share, unchanged over the past 30 days and implying 61.54% year-over-year growth, with Shopify carrying a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

CoreWeave announced the availability of NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 on its cloud, with Cognition becoming the first customer anywhere to run production workloads on the system. Cognition, the applied AI lab behind Devin, stood up a Vera Rubin NVL72 cluster in early September and its own engineers ran the first customer-executed Vera Rubin inference benchmark, measured against a GB200 NVL72 cluster baseline. Cognition measured a 4.8 times increase in total token throughput for its SWE-2 inference workloads on Vera Rubin NVL72 compared to GB200 NVL72, plus a 3.8 times boost in output token throughput for reinforcement learning workloads. CoreWeave said customers run the new system under the same operating model and tooling as their existing NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and GB300 NVL72 fleets, and that it is one of the first cloud providers to deploy NVIDIA Vera Rubin, having also published the industry's first measured silicon performance numbers on the platform. The announcement was made at Fully Connected, CoreWeave's AI cloud conference, which drew more than 4,500 customers, partners, developers and AI leaders.

CoreWeave Inc. announced it will expand its compute portfolio with the NVIDIA Vera CPU, the first CPU designed for AI agents, at its Fully Connected AI cloud conference in San Francisco. The company said rack-scale Vera at CoreWeave puts 128 CPUs and 11,264 cores in a single rack, with BlueField-4 DPUs and Spectrum-X Ethernet switching, providing room for more than 11,000 concurrent agent environments. In testing, CoreWeave achieved more than 3x faster agent sandbox startup times on NVIDIA Vera CPU compared to an x86 CPU. Chen Goldberg, executive vice president of product and engineering at CoreWeave, said general-purpose infrastructure bottlenecks agentic AI and that Vera is the first CPU explicitly designed to accelerate it. CoreWeave said NVIDIA Vera runs bare metal under the same platform, consumption models and economics as the rest of its fleet, and is natively enabled through products such as CoreWeave Sandboxes.

Ennoble Care LLC has selected CoreWeave Cloud to run its clinical AI inference workloads, deploying NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition nodes on CoreWeave Kubernetes Service. The agreement, announced at CoreWeave's Fully Connected conference, gives the home-based primary, palliative and hospice care provider dedicated, reserved GPU capacity with hardware-enforced isolation and zero-trust controls. Ennoble Care, which operates as an accountable care organization across 15 states and serves approximately 50,000 patients a year, said the deployment will let it scale the AI capabilities built into its proprietary electronic medical record system to tens of thousands of additional patients. Chief technology officer Jonathan Taylor said CoreWeave offers reserved capacity, a Kubernetes environment the team can move into quickly, and direct engineering support. CoreWeave chief revenue officer Jon Jones said clinical inference demands continuous workloads, short latency budgets and absolute compliance requirements.

MongoDB interim president and CEO Dev Ittycheria said the company is not in a rush to find a permanent successor to Chirantan "CJ" Desai, who left after roughly 11 months to lead a new AI platform for enterprise customers at Meta Platforms. Speaking on Bloomberg The Close, Ittycheria said Desai's departure was not anticipated but that the business is on solid footing, and he attributed the move to a very lucrative financial offer from Meta rather than any issue at MongoDB. At the company's investor day, MongoDB raised its long-term revenue growth guide from high teens to 20 plus percent, lifted its Atlas guidance from 20% to the mid 20s, and committed to double-digit growth in its EA business, which it said it had not seen in the last couple of years. Ittycheria also pointed to strong guidance for profitability and cash flow, citing secular AI tailwinds, and said MongoDB's newest version Alice 9.0 and a new capability called Alice Infinite push the envelope of elasticity and scale for agentic workloads. He added that MongoDB expects to be a net beneficiary as customers move brittle, expensive legacy applications to modern platforms, and that buying behavior has shifted as customers weigh IP protection, data residency, choice and cost.

Morgan Stanley raised its price target on Okta to $245 from $200 while reiterating an Overweight rating, citing the cybersecurity company's exposure to securing AI agents. Analyst Meta Marshall issued the bullish call after Okta's September 23 Oktane event, where the company highlighted new AI-agent identity products and partnerships. Marshall said Okta is generally seen as a secular winner from Agentic Identity exposure, and the investment case is also benefiting from stretched valuations across cybersecurity leaders such as Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike. The event did not deliver everything investors wanted, however, as some analysts were disappointed that Okta provided no new financial guidance or updated longer-term targets, leaving the near-term earnings picture largely unchanged. Marshall cautioned that the opportunity will likely develop gradually, saying moves this year relate to technical debt being addressed, though she continues to see runway with the name. Okta stock has already surged roughly 140% in 2026.

Akamai announced that SoftServe, an AI and technology services company with expertise in data and cloud solutions, has joined the Akamai Partner Connect program. The partnership is aimed at helping enterprises optimize multicloud environments, lower infrastructure costs, and accelerate edge AI deployments. SoftServe's offerings under the program include cloud strategy support to optimize compute resources and budget for long-term growth, custom-built small and large language models and AI inferencing optimized for distributed infrastructure and GPU networks, and advisory and development services for deep and emerging technologies. The collaboration provides AI consulting, digital modernization, and specialized managed services to customers in verticals including high tech, healthcare, financial services, and industrial and manufacturing. SoftServe Vice President of Technology Olga Salaichuk said the partnership handles complex back-end tasks so client teams can focus on building, while Akamai Senior Vice President of Global Cloud Sales Parimal Pandya said SoftServe's AI expertise combined with Akamai's global scale builds a foundation for customers' biggest projects. Akamai and SoftServe are exhibiting at NVIDIA GTC Berlin 2026, October 20 to 22, at booths 3064 and 7028, respectively.

Snowflake completed private offerings of zero-coupon, senior unsecured convertible notes totaling US$3.75 billion in late September 2026, split between maturities in 2029 and 2031 under Rule 144A. Alongside the financing, Liquibase announced the availability of Liquibase Secure on Snowflake Marketplace, a third-party tool that helps customers automate and govern data-related changes. The zero-interest convertible raise is seen mainly as affecting near-term debate around dilution and balance sheet risk rather than Snowflake's core thesis, while the Liquibase launch reinforces the company's push to sit at the center of governed, auditable data change. Snowflake's narrative projects $11.9 billion in revenue and $202.2 million in earnings by 2029, with a fair value estimate of $425.19, a 30% upside to its current price. Some of the lowest-estimate analysts assume about 23 percent annual revenue growth but no profits within three years, a picture that could shift if the fresh zero-coupon debt and potential dilution reshape expectations.

Snowflake plans a private offering of US$3.5b in 0.00% Convertible Senior Notes due 2029 and 2031, to be sold to qualified institutional buyers in two series. The company intends to use the proceeds for note repurchases, potential investments, and capped call transactions that may limit share dilution. The zero coupon structure gives Snowflake extra capital without adding ongoing interest expense, a consideration for a business still working toward sustained profitability. The other side of the trade is future dilution risk if the converts are ultimately exchanged into equity, especially with analysts already expecting shares outstanding to climb. Snowflake runs a cloud-based data platform used by organizations that store, process, and share large volumes of information across different clouds, and competes with Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

Wangsu Science & Technology announced that the company plans to use its own funds to subscribe for 300 million yuan worth of Series A+ preferred shares to be issued by Sandai Cayman, and will hold a 4.3963% equity stake in Sandai Cayman upon completion of the investment. As a transitional arrangement, the company will first provide 300 million yuan in convertible bonds to Shanghai Sandai Technology and obtain Series A+ warrants. Sand.ai was founded in January 2024 and is mainly engaged in the research and development of visual content generation models and application products based on video models.

A number of listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges issued important announcements on the evening of September 29. Wangsu Science & Technology plans to use 300 million yuan of its own funds, equivalent to 44.4517 million US dollars, to subscribe for 2.1054 million Series A+ preferred shares at 21.1137 US dollars per share in the video generation model company Sandai Cayman, and will hold a 4.3963 percent equity stake after the transaction is completed. The full industry chain project for producing 60,000 tonnes of energy-grade titanium and titanium alloy materials per year, invested and built by Anning Iron & Titanium, has produced its first furnace of titanium sponge, with a single furnace output of about 13 tonnes, and the project has entered the trial production stage. BOMESC's wholly-owned subsidiary Tianjin BOMESC signed a contract with Single Buoy Moorings Inc. for the construction of FPSO topside modules, with a contract value of approximately 1.6 billion to 2.1 billion yuan, scheduled for completion in the second half of 2028. The controlling shareholder of Dongyangguang, Shenzhen Dongyangguang Industrial, proposed that the company repurchase shares through centralized competitive trading, with a capital scale of no less than 600 million yuan and no more than 1.2 billion yuan. Huazhijie plans to acquire 83.5052 percent equity in Geliming through the issuance of shares and payment of cash, and to raise supporting funds, and its shares will resume trading when the market opens on September 30. Jianyan Institute's shares will be suspended from trading when the market opens on September 30 because related parties are planning major matters involving the company, and the suspension is expected to last no more than two trading days.