TAI Explorations: Meeting Akamai
Welcome to AI Explorations. We designed this series with a simple mandate: less sales, more product and tech. We invite companies from Japan and abroad to showcase their solutions, keeping the marketing pitch brief to prioritize live demos and technical features. Our goal is to help you cut through the noise, understand how these tools actually work, and have fun adopting new technology for your stack.
The Session
In this session, we’ll meet Jay Jenkins, CTO of Cloud Computing at Akamai, and take a hands-on look at Akamai’s cloud and GPU capabilities in 2026.
Jay and the Akamai team will walk through their end-to-end GPU test program, followed by a live demonstration of the Linode platform, including one-click deployment of vLLM for large language models. The session will focus on how these systems work in practice: deployment workflows, performance considerations, and current limitations.
The session will be highly interactive. We want to hear directly from teams building or experimenting with GPU-intensive workloads. Attendees will have the opportunity to share requirements, constraints, and real-world use cases, with feedback captured and taken back to Akamai’s Cambridge engineering team to help inform future product improvements and launches.
Reference implementation:
https://github.com/linode/ai-quickstart-gpt-oss-20b
What you’ll see
A walkthrough of Akamai’s GPU test program, from setup to evaluation
A live demo of the Linode platform, including one-click vLLM deployment for LLM workloads
Practical discussion of deployment workflows, performance trade-offs, and current constraints
What you can influence
GPU availability, sizing, and pricing expectations
ML and inference workload requirements (training vs. serving, latency, scale)
Platform features and developer experience priorities for future Akamai cloud releases
Your feedback will be shared directly with Akamai’s Cambridge engineering team to help shape upcoming product improvements and launches.
Who is this for?
This event is designed for engineers, PMs, and researchers working on significant cloud infrastructure.
Agenda
18:00 Doors open
18:30 - 19:30 Interactive talk with Jay Jenkins and Davy Chen
19:30 - 20:30 Networking
20:30 Doors close
Organizers
Ilya Kulyatin: Fintech and AI entrepreneur with work and academic experience in the US, Netherlands, Singapore, UK, and Japan, with an MSc in Machine Learning from UCL.
Supporters
Tokyo AI (TAI) is the biggest AI community in Japan, with 4,000+ members mainly based in Tokyo (engineers, researchers, investors, product managers, and corporate innovation managers).
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