07-23-2026SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSIVE

Everyone hates massive data centers. This $18 billion CEO has a better way to get you the AI compute you need

Akamai CEO Tom Leighton shares his contrarian vision for building a faster (and cheaper) kind of AI infrastructure. And he’s got Nvidia on his side.

[Source photos: Adobe Stock]

For the past few years, the AI infrastructure race has been driven by the assumption that larger artificial intelligence models require larger data centers. That idea has fueled an extraordinary wave of spending.

In rural Richland Parish, Louisiana, for example, Meta is building one of the world’s largest AI infrastructure projects. Its Hyperion campus is expected to cost more than $50 billion and run on about 5 gigawatts of power, roughly the output of five nuclear reactors.

But as these facilities grow, so does the resistance to them. Across the country,........

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