This time last year, we were writing about Akamai going “all-in” on VPUs (Video Processing Units) after rolling out a slab of purpose-built Quadra cards for video encoding tasks from Netint Technologies. Less than twelve months later, Akamai has announced it will deploy thousands of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to create what the CDN and cybersecurity company claims will be one of the world’s most widely distributed AI platforms. This does not necessarily signal a retreat on VPUs by Akamai, as this is a separate story focused on AI inference, rather than dedicated video encoding (though Netint’s VPUs do cite AI inference as a use case, so there are some workload overlaps for us to explore). Akamai is now maneuvering to…