Spread of the Day, 5/8/26: AKAM (Akamai) rose 26.6% while NET (Cloudflare) fell 23.6%, a 50.2 percentage-point gap.

This was the cleanest split inside internet infrastructure: the market rewarded confirmed AI cloud demand after Akamai’s reported $1.8 billion Anthropic deal, while punishing Cloudflare for slower growth, margin pressure, and an AI-driven restructuring story that looked more like cost strain than operating leverage.