F. Leighton2:02
Thanks, Mark. I'm pleased to report that Akamai is off to a strong start to the year. In just a few months, we've achieved major milestones for our cloud computing strategy, marking a definitive turning point in the growth and evolution of our business. Akamai has long been known for operating the world's largest distributed platform for delivery and security solutions at global scale and with a reputation for reliability, quality, and trust. Now, we're leveraging our global footprint and years of experience supporting the world's largest enterprises to become an indispensable infrastructure provider for the AI-driven economy. At GTC in March, we unveiled the industry's first global-scale implementation of NVIDIA's AI grid and we announced the rollout of thousands of NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 GPUs. By integrating NVIDIA AI infrastructure into Akamai's massive distributed platform and by leveraging intelligent workload orchestration across our network, we intend to move the market for AI beyond isolated AI factories toward a unified distributed grid for AI inference. By pushing AI inference to the edge and combining it with our massive deployment of CPUs for delivery, security, and functions as a service, we're enabling customers to run complex models within milliseconds of their end users with the responsiveness of local compute and the scale of the global web, optimizing performance while reducing latency and cost. Those who attended GTC heard NVIDIA reference Akamai as a vital player in the industry's ecosystem for AI infrastructure and we've seen very positive market reaction to our rapidly expanding capabilities from a wide spectrum of enterprises.
Today, we're very excited to announce another major milestone for our cloud computing strategy and the evolution of Akamai: the signing of a landmark 7-year, $1.8 billion commitment for our cloud infrastructure services by a leading frontier model company. This is the largest customer deal in Akamai history. And it comes on the heels of the $200 million CIS deal we announced in February with a major US tech company also at the forefront of the AI revolution. These leaders in AI have chosen Akamai because their AI workloads need the scale, performance, and reliability that our cloud platform provides. Many other enterprises have chosen Akamai for similar reasons. For example, since the start of the year, a leading cloud and digital infrastructure provider in Asia chose our VPUs to support their low-latency live streaming media service. An AI company in the US chose our GPU platform to power their voice-first solution to optimize business operations. An AI-powered video intelligent platform in India chose our GPU platform to scale video analytics and computer vision workloads for retailers. A consumer AI platform in the US chose Akamai cloud to run and scale live personalized agents. An AI commerce company in India chose our distributed inference platform to power their ad personalization engine. And two premier global retail brands chose our distributed data capabilities to improve the performance and resilience of their online retail applications.
But all this is just the beginning. We have a large and rapidly expanding pipeline of prospects who are looking to Akamai for cloud solutions, including some with very large needs. To satisfy this strong and growing demand for our cloud infrastructure services, we expect to continue to build out both our physical infrastructure and our cloud sales and support teams. And as Ed will talk about in a few minutes, we now anticipate significant acceleration of our overall revenue growth heading into 2027 and beyond.
Turning to security, I'm pleased to report that Q1 was also strong for our security portfolio where revenue grew 11% year-over-year as reported and 9% in constant currency. Our security growth was led by strong demand for our market-leading web app firewall, API security, and Guardicore segmentation solutions. Our WAF in particular is seeing growing interest from customers eager to deploy the latest defenses for vulnerabilities that could be exposed by the ever-strengthening frontier models and AI-powered attacks. Frontier models are changing vulnerability management and we're proud to be one of the industry's must-have security providers partnering with the frontier model companies to help ensure the safe and rapid deployment of AI-enhanced defenses. With our early access to their vulnerability detection programs, we're applying our expertise to help keep major enterprises and critical infrastructure safe.
Of course, and this is important to understand, attackers will also be using more advanced AI technology to develop even more potent ways to cause harm. This means that major enterprises will need Akamai security solutions even more than before. For example, there are many legacy systems and billions of deployed devices that can't be patched. They'll become a lot more vulnerable with the advances in AI, and they'll need our security solutions to keep them safe. For the devices and systems that can be patched, the patching process still takes time, often days or weeks, and they'll need our protection until that's done. We've seen this happen before when zero-day attacks emerged. And with the advances in AI, we can expect zero-day attacks to occur much more frequently.
There's also an increasing challenge with scale. Because AI is enabling attackers to take over more devices and create enormous bot armies, we're now seeing attacks with unprecedented volumes. Just in the last few weeks, we neutralized a series of app-layer attacks with millions of malicious requests per second from millions of widely distributed IPs. Akamai can defend against such attacks because of our widely distributed platform. Our WAF runs in 4,300 locations across 700 cities to intercept the attack traffic right where it enters the internet and well before it can coalesce onto the target. Having a great WAF with the needed defenses for the latest attacks is obviously important, but that alone isn't enough in the coming age of AI. The WAFs need to be deployed across a vast distributed platform and this need provides a unique advantage for Akamai when compared to the competition.
In summary, we believe that Akamai's security portfolio will be needed more than ever before as attackers take advantage of the advances in AI. That's because of our massive platform scale to absorb attacks, our unparalleled access to real-time attack data, our tight integration with the early warning ecosystem to provide up-to-the-minute defenses for the latest zero-day attacks, our large and very experienced human security operations team that's equipped with the latest AI tools to enhance visibility and minimize response times, and our innovative, rapidly evolving and AI-enabled product suite to help prevent penetrations and to limit the damage when penetrations do occur.
Customers who selected Akamai in Q1 for that kind of protection for their APIs included one of the largest telecom groups in Africa, a major investment management company in South America, one of the premier investment banks in the Middle East, and one of the world's leading fintech companies in the US. Customers who added or expanded their use of our Guardicore segmentation solution in Q1 included the leading telecom carrier and media company in South Korea, one of the largest banking groups in Europe, and a leading healthcare company in the US. Many of the large renewals we signed in Q1 also included expansions of our security services. For example, after we protected one of America's leading retailers from unwanted bots during the holiday shopping season, they increased the use of our services in a contract worth $24 million. We signed an expansion contract worth $80 million over two years with one of the world's largest video game companies. We signed an expansion contract worth more than $20 million with a global consumer electronics company in Korea. And one of the largest global professional services companies in the world expanded their use of our ZTNA solution to secure large-scale remote access as they move critical applications to a zero-trust model.
Our security solutions continue to receive top recognitions from the major analyst firms for their effectiveness. For example, last quarter, Akamai achieved a 99% recommendation rating as customer's choice in Gartner's peer insights report on micro-segmentation. And last month, Akamai was the only provider to be named customer's choice in Gartner's peer insights report on API protection.
In closing, we're thrilled by the way our growth strategy has taken hold and is generating transformative opportunities for our business. We believe that Akamai is uniquely positioned to enable and benefit from the development of the AI-driven economy. By bringing powerful compute directly to the data and the users at the edge, Akamai is enabling and securing the next generation of agentic AI. With each quarter, the massive opportunity we see ahead becomes more evident. And we're making bold investments to capitalize on that opportunity and enable Akamai to do for cloud and AI what we've done for security and CDN to generate significant future growth for our business. Now I'll turn the call over to Ed for more on our results and our outlook for Q2 and the year. Ed.