Akamai Technologies has acquired Fermyon to enhance its offerings in serverless computing, specifically for Web Assembly (Wasm) applications. Earlier this year, the two companies began collaborating, integrating Fermyon’s Wasm Functions engine into Akamai’s cloud, networking, and storage solutions. This integration includes EdgeWorkers, which allows IT teams to deploy applications in JavaScript or Wasm at the network edge. As a result, organizations can now launch low-latency applications in minutes, with cold start times cut down to mere milliseconds. Recently, Fermyon’s Wasm Functions have demonstrated the ability to handle up to 75 million requests per second in production environments. Fermyon also maintains the Spin Framework, an open-source project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation aimed at simplifying the creation of serverless Wasm applications. Akamai’s VP of product marketing, Ari Weil, emphasized that the Fermyon platform will facilitate the development of distributed Wasm applications, especially for chaining AI agents to automate workflows at the edge. Fermyon's CEO, Matt Butcher, highlighted the importance of deploying AI applications using Wasm to reduce latency and deployment costs by placing inference engines closer to data sources. Akamai promotes its Managed Container Service, enabling organizations to deploy cloud-native applications globally across thousands of points of presence. The company has also introduced Akamai Inference Cloud for distributing AI workloads across cloud and edge environments. Wasm is gaining traction as an alternative to traditional containers, offering a binary-code format that simplifies cross-platform application development. Although the extent of Wasm adoption among organizations remains unclear, backing from major players like Microsoft and Amazon is improving the available tooling. Akamai sees Wasm as a solution to the growing demand for scalable application distribution, especially in the AI landscape, thanks to its partnership with Fermyon.