Akamai to quit its CDN in China, seemingly not due to trouble from Beijing

Akamai has decided to end its content delivery network services in China, but not because it’s finding it hard to do business in the Middle Kingdom.

News of Akamai’s decision to end CDN services in China emerged in a letter it recently published and sent to customers and partners that opens by reminding them the company has a “commitment to providing world-class delivery and security solutions” – and must therefore inform them that “Effective June 30, 2026, all China CDN services will reach their decommission date.”

Customers are offered a choice: do nothing and then be moved to an Akamai CDN located outside China, or use similar services from Chinese companies Tencent Cloud and Wangsu Science & Technology. The letter, however, warns that “All current China CDN customers must complete the transition to our Partners’ solution by June 30, 2026, to maintain uninterrupted service.” So maybe that cutover to offshore services won’t be so easy.

Akamai can already help with migration to Tencent Cloud’s services and is working on similar offerings for Wangsu.

China is a tricky place to do business for foreign companies, who are nearly always required to operate through local partners and can sometimes find authorities asking very pointed and detailed questions about how their products and technologies operate.

IBM and Microsoft have even established centers at which they conduct very detailed demos of their wares to Chinese authorities, ostensibly to reassure them they don’t represent security threats.

Some tech vendors are therefore leery of working in China, as they fear the country’s requirements represent unwelcome risk of IP leakage.

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That appears not to be the case for Akamai, which told us that “Like any business, we constantly evaluate our offerings in each market to best address our customers' needs” and that it remains committed to China.

Akamai also shared its belief Chinese companies that operate abroad will find it has a lot to offer.

A spokesperson also pointed us to a transcript of its August 2024 earnings call, on which CEO and co-founder Tom Leighton stated that the company has “transformed from a content delivery pioneer into the cloud company that powers and protects life online.”

That means compute and security services now generate two thirds of revenue, and Leighton expressed his belief that those products “provide Akamai with excellent potential for future growth and profitability.”

Which leaves content delivery looking rather dull by comparison, and perhaps also hard work given that since Akamai pioneered the market the likes of Cloudflare and AWS have become competitors.

All of which leaves Chinese Akamai CDN users with just under eighteen months to contemplate their next moves, a decent amount to sort themselves out. ®