Raymond James lifts Akamai to Strong Buy after ‘AI Is Dead’ selloff
October 20, 2026 9:17 AM EDT
Investing.com -- Raymond James raised its rating for Akamai Technologies from Outperform to Strong Buy in a note on Tuesday. The firm said last week's drop in the stock price created a good opportunity to buy shares.
Raymond James kept its $170 price target for Akamai. The shares rose 1.4% before the market opened.
Analyst Frank Louthan said the market's “AI Is Dead” trade, driven by concerns about credit risks and higher interest rates, hit Akamai especially hard. Akamai has committed $5.5 billion to generate more than $11 billion in revenue from Anthropic.
“We believe the pullback creates a compelling long-term opportunity,” Louthan wrote.
The analyst said investors' main concern about the Anthropic deal last month was that Akamai's cost of borrowing money might be too high compared with the returns it expects to earn. Now that interest rates are expected to rise, this concern has grown. Louthan also said the market may be worried about whether AI companies such as Anthropic will have enough funding to meet their financial commitments.
Raymond James said it could not be certain that Anthropic would meet its commitments under the deal. However, the firm noted that Anthropic is generally believed to have about $520 billion in infrastructure-related financial commitments over the next seven to 10 years. Akamai accounts for less than 3% of that total.
Louthan said this means dropping Akamai would not save Anthropic a significant amount of money. He added that Akamai offers a more distinct cloud service than other providers Anthropic uses and does not compete directly with AI companies.
“We do not expect this to be a popular call in the short term, but over the next 12 months, we expect AKAM to rebound as it sees revenue from Anthropic and other Inference Cloud customers,” he said.