As stated by Jim Cramer on Thursday, the surge in network traffic brought about by AI agents is creating new growth opportunities for companies that help the internet operate smoothly, and it also means profit-making opportunities for investors.
"One side effect of the AI revolution is that it has generated an astonishing amount of internet traffic, and there are people who need to help us keep the internet running smoothly," said the host of Mad Money.
Cloudflare, Akamai Technologies, and Fastly operate server networks, helping to manage digital traffic and making websites faster and more reliable. As artificial intelligence proxies generate more online activity, their role is becoming increasingly important. Since the beginning of the year, these three stocks have risen by 159%, 78%, and 22% respectively, far outperforming the S&P 500 index, which gained about 12% during the same period.
Cloudflare has become a major beneficiary of this trend. In June of this year, the CEO Matthew Prince told Cramer that the traffic generated by AI proxies had surpassed the human traffic on the company's network. Cramer is optimistic about this company, but since the price-earnings ratio calculated based on this year's expected earnings is around 279 times, he suggests waiting for a pullback before making a purchase.
Akamai recently announced a plan to build a network consisting of smaller data centers, bringing the workload of AI closer to the user end for processing, thereby reducing latency as the industry transitions from model training to large-scale applications. Last week, Anthropic committed to providing an additional $11.6 billion in computing power support to Akamai over the next seven years, and this strategy has received significant recognition. After the announcement, the stock initially soared, but then lost most of its gains. Cramer believes this creates an opportunity to buy.
“I think you can buy this stock right now,” said Cramer. The price-earnings ratio of Akamai is less than 16 times this year’s expected earnings, and he believes that investors “are essentially getting the latest Anthropic collaboration for free.”
Fastly is also repositioning itself for the AI era, shifting from a traditional content distribution network to an "edge cloud" platform that can benefit from traffic growth driven by AI. In simple terms, this means placing its infrastructure closer to where the demand is, in order to provide users with faster response times. However, based on this year's expected earnings, its price-earnings ratio is around 50 times, and its stock price has historically been quite volatile. Cramer suggests waiting for a better entry point.
“Currently, for me, Akamai is the only stock that is so cheap that I really want to strongly recommend it,” said Cramer.
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