DX Today AI Daily Brief - Saturday, May 9, 2026

DX Today AI Daily Brief - Saturday, May 9, 2026

Anthropic signs a one point eight billion dollar seven year compute deal with Akamai, the largest contract in Akamai's history

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:00

It's Saturday, May 9th, 2026. You're listening to the DX Today AI Daily Brief. Today, Anthropic signs the largest cloud deal in Akamai's history. Apple and Intel reach a preliminary pact to manufacture iPhone chips, and Cloudflare reshapes itself around agentic AI, cutting one in five jobs. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Anthropic has signed a$1.8 billion, seven-year cloud computing agreement with Akamai Technologies, the largest commercial deal in Akamai's history. The contract, first reported by Bloomberg on Friday, gives Anthropic dedicated capacity on Akamai's cloud and edge network to power its clawed family of AI models. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amade told investors his company is, quote, working as quickly as possible to secure additional compute as customer demand outstrips supply. Akemai shares closed up roughly 27% in after the announcement, the stock's largest single-day gain in more than a decade. The agreement extends Anthropic's compute footprint, which already spans Amazon, Google, and Elon Musk's SpaceX.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Now, a chip industry shakeup. Apple and Intel have reached a preliminary chip making agreement, according to a Wall Street Journal report on Friday. The deal would have Intel manufacture some of the silicon that powers Apple devices. The first time Apple has used Intel as a foundry partner since the company moved its Macs to in-house designs. Talks have stretched on for more than a year, with President Trump personally lobbying for an Intel partnership during a White House meeting with Apple chief executive Tim Cook. Intel is now partly owned by the United States government, and the contract would deliver a steady stream of demand for its struggling foundry business. Intel shares jumped nearly 15% on the news, while Apple closed up just under 2%.

SPEAKER_04 2:11

From silicon to software cuts. Cloudflare has announced it will lay off roughly 1,100 employees, about 20% of its workforce, in the first mass layoff in the company's 16-year history. Chief Executive Matthew Prince said the company is restructuring around agentic AI, revealing that internal AI usage inside Cloudflare jumped more than 600% in three months. Prince argued that traditional support roles will not drive the company forward, as employees across engineering, finance, and marketing now run thousands of agent sessions a day. The decision came alongside first quarter results that beat expectations, with revenue up 34% year over year. Cloudflare shares dropped roughly 18% on Thursday following the announcement. Next, a major infrastructure deal.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Nvidia and Australian data center operator IRN announced a strategic partnership to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of next generation AI infrastructure. Under the agreement, IRN issued Nvidia a five-year warrant to purchase up to 30 million ordinary shares at$70 apiece. An investment that could reach$2.1 billion. The companies also signed a separate five-year cloud services contract worth about$3.4 billion, under which IRN will supply NVIDIA with managed GPU cloud services for its own internal AI and research workloads. Future deployments will center on IRN's two-gigawatt sweetwater campus in Texas, the flagship for Nvidia's new DSX AI factory architecture. IRN shares jumped more than 20% in after-hours trading.

SPEAKER_05 3:58

Across the Atlantic, regulators move.

SPEAKER_03 4:01

The European Council Presidency and European Parliament negotiators reached a provisional agreement Thursday on a sweeping simplification of the Blocks AI Act, part of the so-called Omnibus 7 legislative package. Under the deal, the Commission can postpone the timeline for high-risk AI system rules by up to 16 months, allowing the rules to take effect only once the supporting standards and tools are in place. The agreement also pushes back the deadline for national AI regulatory sandboxes to August 2nd, 2027, while shortening the grace period for transparency rules on AI-generated content from six months to three. European industrial heavyweights, including Siemens, have praised the move as critical to keeping pace with American and Chinese competitors.

SPEAKER_05 4:51

From policy to pharma.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

AstraZeneca has expanded its AI biotech partnership with New York-based Immunei, a deal that could deliver up to$37.5 million to the startup over 2026 and 2027. Immunei operates a comprehensive map of the human immune system using AI to analyze complex biological data and predict how individual patients will respond to therapies. AstraZeneca will integrate the platform across its oncology drug development programs with a focus on identifying biomarkers that can reduce costly late-stage clinical trial failures. The expanded collaboration extends an existing partnership through 2027 and signals continued pharmaceutical industry investment in AI-driven drug discovery, where Pfizer, Merck, and Novonordisk have all announced major AI tie-ups this year.

SPEAKER_02 5:43

Now the China AI race. Chinese AI lab Moonshot has closed a roughly$2 billion funding round at a$20 billion valuation, a stunning leap from its$4.3 billion mark at the end of 2025. The round was led by Longzi Investment, the venture arm of food delivery giant Mei Tuan, with participation from Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuan Feng. Moonshot, founded in 2023 by former Meta and Google brain researcher Yang Ji Lin, has raised nearly$3.9 billion in the past six months alone. Its open source Kimi K 2.6 model now ranks as the second most used large language model on the Open Router distribution platform, with annualized revenue from paid products reportedly topping$200 million.

SPEAKER_04 6:47

Now a data warehouse pivot. Teradata has unveiled the Teradata Autonomous Knowledge Platform, a unified layer combining data, analytics, and agentic AI across both Teradata Cloud and on-premises Teradata factory environments. The platform integrates an AI studio for building agents, a Terra workspace for orchestration, and connectors that pull in unstructured data alongside traditional warehouse tables. Teradata is positioning the launch as its biggest product update in more than a decade, betting that enterprises burned by ungoverned AI agents will pay a premium for a single platform that unifies data lineage, security, and audit trails. General availability is targeted for the third quarter. The company says early customers in financial services and healthcare are already running production agent AIC workflows on a private preview.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

On the security front, SNCC has made the integration of Anthropics Claude models inside its AI security platform generally available this week, bringing Claude's reasoning abilities directly into developer code review and vulnerability triage workflows. The expanded access will roll out to joint customers across 2026. SNICE says the integration enables Claude to scan pull requests, identify exploitable vulnerabilities, propose patches, and explain root cause to developers in plain language. The launch is part of a wider trend of foundational model providers being embedded inside specialized enterprise software, as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google compete to become the default reasoning engine inside developer tools, customer support platforms, and security operations centers.

SPEAKER_05 8:34

More AI-driven workforce news.

SPEAKER_03 8:37

Meta will lay off 10% of its workforce, roughly 8,000 employees, with cuts beginning May 20th. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told staff the reductions are tied directly to AI-driven productivity gains and a strategic refocus on superintelligence research. The Meta cuts join a wave of AI-linked workforce reductions this week from Cloudflare, Coinbase, Bill, and Upwork. Meta said it will continue aggressive hiring in AI infrastructure and frontier research, where the company is racing to match capacity announcements from OpenAI and Anthropic. Bank of America analysts called the cuts evidence that AI has moved from experimental to operational at scale, with payroll savings now flowing directly to capital expenditure budgets supporting new data center construction.

SPEAKER_05 9:29

Now, an AI infrastructure earnings beat.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Core Weave reported first quarter revenue of$2.078 billion on Thursday, with a remaining performance obligation backlog of$99.4 billion, both records for the AI cloud provider. The company disclosed new contracts with Anthropic and Meta during the quarter, alongside expanded commitments from existing customers. Core Weave shares were volatile after hours as investors weighed strong revenue against widening losses tied to aggressive data center build out. Chief Executive Michael Intrator told analysts demand for high-end NVIDIA capacity remains, quote, materially in excess of available supply, with new contracts now routinely stretching five to seven years. Core Weave reaffirmed full-year revenue guidance and raised its capital expenditure outlook to roughly$25 billion.

SPEAKER_05 10:24

And finally, a research breakthrough.

SPEAKER_02 10:27

Anthropic this week unveiled a new technique for its Claude-managed agents called Dreaming, designed to help autonomous AI systems consolidate memory and improve performance between sessions. Announced at Anthropic's Code with Claude Developer Conference, the Dreaming Process lets agents review prior workflows, identify recurring patterns, and refine internal heuristics without human supervision. Anthropic says early benchmarks show meaningful gains on long horizon coding, finance, and legal research tasks where agents previously struggled to maintain context across multiple sessions. The feature is rolling out in research preview to enterprise customers alongside expanded multi agent orchestration tools. That's your briefing for Saturday, May 9th, 2026. For DX Today, stay curious.