Why would Akamai, the content delivery giant turned cloud hyperscaler and cybersecurity stalwart, need to recruit the services of a smaller company to ultimately make Akamai’s services faster and more efficient? Has Akamai bitten off more than it can chew in its mission to compete with Google, AWS, and Azure? The CDN company’s cloud compute growth has certainly been impressive, if not aggressive, and now Akamai needs the help of VAST Data, described as an AI data platform company, to take Akamai’s data-intensive computing to a new level. In other words, Akamai is about to double down on artificial intelligence, specifically to “usher in the era of edge AI inference”—though the company doesn’t want to talk much about it. Instead…