The nature of video consumption has changed dramatically as video is no longer limited to media and entertainment but now a core component of AI applications, live commerce, gaming, enterprise collaboration, social platforms, and real-time analytics. As video workloads continue to grow in scale and complexity, Mitesh Jain, Regional Vice President, India, Akamai Technologies feels that organizations are looking for a more efficient way to process and deliver video without the cost and operational burden of managing specialized infrastructure. In an exclusive interaction, Jain tells Rajneesh De, Group Editor, APAC Media & CXO Media how Akamai recognized an opportunity to bring specialized video processing capabilities to the cloud. This shift to cloud-based VPUs helps media companies dramatically improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of large-scale content delivery.
What solutions and services are currently available in the Akamai portfolio for the Indian market?
India’s digital economy is expanding at an unprecedented pace, and organizations are under pressure to innovate faster while maintaining performance, security, and cost efficiency. Akamai’s portfolio is designed to help businesses achieve these outcomes by bringing together cloud computing and cybersecurity capabilities on a globally distributed platform.
On the cybersecurity front, Akamai helps enterprises protect their websites, APIs, applications, and digital infrastructure from a growing range of threats. This includes defense against malicious bots, phishing attempts, DDoS attacks, account takeovers, and other forms of online abuse. Akamai also supports businesses with Zero Trust solutions that enable secure access to applications without relying on traditional VPN-based approaches.
Cloud computing is another strategic growth area. Through Akamai Cloud, we deliver a distributed cloud model that brings compute, storage, and security closer to users and workloads. This enables organizations to build and scale AI applications, modernize legacy infrastructure, improve application performance, and optimize cloud costs without compromising security.
This approach improves performance, enhances business agility, and helps organizations align with evolving regulatory and data requirements.
Today, Akamai supports some of the world’s largest companies, including leading banks and financial institutions, by helping keep digital experiences closer to users and online threats farther away.
How do you see the demand for video processing power skyrocketing in India and what are the use cases?
India is one of the world’s fastest-growing digital economies, and video has become a fundamental part of how businesses engage customers, deliver services, and create value. As organizations embrace AI, digital commerce, and real-time applications, the demand for high-performance video processing is growing rapidly across industries.
While streaming media remains a major driver, we’re also seeing video become business critical in sectors such as retail, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and the public sector. Retailers are using AI-powered video to enhance customer experiences and analyze shopper behavior. Manufacturers are deploying computer vision for quality inspection and predictive maintenance. Healthcare providers increasingly rely on high-quality telemedicine and diagnostic imaging, while smart city initiatives are leveraging video analytics for traffic management, public safety, and urban planning.
This is where Akamai’s cloud-based VPUs make a meaningful difference. With faster encoding, lower latency, and dynamic scalability, organizations can meet rising demand across formats, geographies, and real-time processing without compromising quality or incurring high compute costs.
As Indian organizations continue investing in AI and digital business, VPUs provide a more efficient foundation for building video-rich applications, helping businesses innovate faster, optimize infrastructure costs, and deliver the high-quality digital experiences customers increasingly expect.
What are the benefits of Akamai bringing VPUs to the cloud?
Historically, public cloud infrastructure has been built around general-purpose CPUs and GPUs because they support a broad range of workloads. However, video has become one of the most compute-intensive applications in today’s digital economy, and processing it efficiently requires specialized infrastructure.
By integrating VPUs into our distributed cloud, we provide organizations with lower latency, reduced costs, and greater energy efficiency for video processing. This is especially important as organizations adopt AI-powered video applications, live streaming, immersive media, and real-time communications. Video is becoming central to customer engagement, employee collaboration, and digital services, and businesses need infrastructure that can keep pace without driving up cloud costs.
For content creators, this means affordable access to high-performance video processing capabilities that were previously limited to enterprise-grade infrastructure. Combined with Akamai’s distributed edge network, creators can deliver low-latency, high-quality video to global audiences with minimal technical overhead.
Why have traditional cloud providers avoided this until now, and what competitive edge does it give Akamai?
Traditionally, enterprises have relied on CPU- and GPU-based cloud infrastructure because it was designed to support a broad range of business workloads. While video processing offers unique advantages, many organizations continue to rely on specialized on-premises infrastructure for large-scale video workloads.
However, the nature of video consumption has changed dramatically. Video is no longer limited to media and entertainment. It is now a core component of AI applications, live commerce, gaming, enterprise collaboration, social platforms, and real-time analytics. As video workloads continue to grow in scale and complexity, organizations are looking for a more efficient way to process and deliver video without the cost and operational burden of managing specialized infrastructure.
At Akamai, we recognized an opportunity to bring specialized video processing capabilities to the cloud. This shift to cloud-based VPUs helps media companies dramatically improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of large-scale content delivery. VPUs are purpose-built for video processing tasks such as encoding and transcoding, allowing organizations to process more streams with significantly less compute overhead than traditional CPU- or GPU-based infrastructure.
This enables faster processing of high-resolution content, reduces latency for live and on-demand streaming, and lowers operational costs. It also allows media companies to deliver consistent video quality across devices and varying network conditions without overprovisioning expensive hardware.
What are the key pillars of Akamai’s GTM strategy in India? What all key initiatives have been undertaken as part of this strategy?
India is one of Akamai’s most strategic growth markets, driven by rapid digitalization, AI adoption, and increasing demand for secure, high-performance digital infrastructure. Our go-to-market strategy is centered on helping organizations modernize their digital operations while balancing innovation, security, and cost efficiency.
Key initiatives include:
- Enabling GPU-powered AI inference at the edge to support real-time AI applications.
- Bringing cloud infrastructure closer to users and data to improve application performance and reduce latency.
- Embedding security, including AI application and workload protection, into the underlying infrastructure.
- Supporting enterprises as they transition from centralized cloud architectures to distributed AI inference at scale.
Beyond technology, we are continuing to invest in the broader ecosystem across India. This includes strengthening partnerships with channel partners to help organizations accelerate digital transformation with confidence.
How are media and entertainment companies benefiting from transcoding-optimized cloud computing?
Media and entertainment companies are under constant pressure to deliver high-quality content across a growing range of devices, networks, and geographies. Transcoding-optimized cloud computing helps address this challenge by enabling faster, scalable, and cost-effective video processing without requiring significant on-premises infrastructure.
By leveraging cloud-based transcoding, media companies can automatically convert content into multiple formats and bitrates, enabling seamless streaming across different devices and network conditions. The elasticity of the cloud also allows them to scale processing capacity on demand during major live events or content launches, reducing turnaround times while optimizing infrastructure costs.
Cloud-based transcoding also supports faster content distribution, improves viewer experiences through adaptive bitrate streaming, and enables more efficient media workflows. As streaming consumption continues to grow, these capabilities help media organizations accelerate content delivery, improve operational efficiency, and meet audience expectations for high-quality, low-latency viewing experiences.
How have Akamai VPUs reshaped scalability and affordability for streaming platforms and video content creators?
Akamai’s VPUs have fundamentally changed the economics of video transcoding by making specialized hardware acceleration available as a cloud service, eliminating the need for media companies and content creators to invest in and manage dedicated on-premises infrastructure. As the first cloud provider to offer VPUs in the cloud, Akamai enables organizations to scale video processing on demand while significantly reducing operational complexity and costs.
VPUs offload compute-intensive transcoding tasks from CPUs, delivering up to 20 times greater throughput than CPU-only solutions while freeing CPU resources for other media workflows such as packaging, captioning, and content processing. This allows streaming platforms to process more video streams using the same infrastructure, improving both efficiency and scalability.
For streaming platforms and video content creators, this translates into the ability to handle high volumes of live streaming, video on demand, and user-generated content more cost effectively. Akamai’s latest 8-card VPU plan further extends these capabilities by supporting more than 320 concurrent live streams from a single instance, enabling customers to scale rapidly during peak demand while maintaining performance and optimizing infrastructure spending. Combined with Akamai’s distributed cloud platform and low egress costs, VPUs help organizations deliver high-quality video experiences at scale with significantly improved price-performance.
What are the best practices media companies should follow in their cloud strategy when adopting VPUs to streamline large-scale content delivery?
A successful cloud strategy starts with adopting VPUs through a phased approach, allowing media companies to validate performance, video quality, and cost efficiencies before scaling to production. This helps minimize operational risk while ensuring transcoding workflows are optimized for real-world workloads.
Media companies should also embrace a hybrid, cloud-native architecture that combines existing infrastructure with on-demand cloud capacity. This provides the flexibility to handle traffic spikes, live events, and growing content libraries without overprovisioning infrastructure or increasing operational complexity.
Continuous optimization is equally important. Monitoring key metrics such as throughput, resource utilization, video quality, and total cost of ownership enables organizations to refine their workflows over time. When paired with automation and purpose-built VPUs, this approach helps deliver scalable, cost-effective, and high-quality streaming experiences.
What are Akamai’s future plans for disrupting media infrastructure in India? Please illustrate these plans with use cases.
India is a strategic growth market for Akamai’s AI infrastructure ambitions. The company has already deployed its AI Inference Cloud in Mumbai and Chennai with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPUs and plans to expand capacity as enterprise demand for AI inference continues to grow. By bringing compute closer to users, Akamai aims to help organizations deliver low-latency, high-performance AI applications while meeting evolving data localization and data sovereignty requirements.
For the media industry, this infrastructure can enable use cases such as real-time video transcoding, AI-powered content personalization, dynamic ad insertion, live streaming, and automated content moderation. Looking ahead, Akamai also sees opportunities to support increasingly personalized viewing experiences, where AI can dynamically tailor video content and advertisements in real time based on individual viewer preferences while maintaining the performance and scale required for large live events.
Through its distributed cloud platform, Akamai is focused on helping media companies build AI-driven services that are faster, more scalable, and closer to end users.
