U.S. stock markets closed higher on Friday, as another wave of enthusiasm for artificial intelligence overshadowed the pressure posed by long-term U.S. Treasury yields remaining above 5%.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.93% to 51,828.62 points; the S&P 500 Index rose 0.51% to 7,743.41 points; the Nasdaq Composite Index rose approximately 0.48%.

The most significant individual stock movement comes from Akamai.

Akamai announced that it has reached a formal agreement with Anthropic for an amount of $11.6 billion over a period of seven years, with the focus on providing CPU with computing power through Akamai Cloud. This agreement can also be expanded by another $9 billion, bringing the potential total commitment to nearly $20 billion.

Akamai is transitioning to AI infrastructure stocks

This Anthropic transaction has changed the way investors view Akamai.

The company is still renowned for its content distribution and network security services, but Anthropic is investing billions of dollars in Akamai's distributed cloud infrastructure for AI workloads.

Anthropic has also obtained warrants, which may ultimately be converted into up to 5% of the ordinary shares of Akamai in the future, should the cooperative relationship expand.

This allowed Akamai to directly participate in the same type of infrastructure transactions as AI. In the past, such transactions have been driving massive financing commitments from cloud and data center companies.

Coinpaper recently reported that, despite U.S. Treasury yields reaching 5.2%, AI stocks have shown resilience, and this transaction involving Akamai has further exacerbated this divergence.

Marvell continues to benefit from transactions at the AI data center

Marvell also closed higher on Friday, rising by 1.15% to $261.94.

The company recently announced record quarterly revenue, reaching $2.74 billion, a year-on-year increase of 37%, with demand for data centers still being the core driving force for growth.

This is also why Marvell is increasingly regarded as a fundamental infrastructure stock of AI, rather than just a simple diversified semiconductor company.

Our previous analysis of NASDAQ and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has shown that, despite the pressure on market sectors that are sensitive to interest rates, investors are still concentrating their funds on companies that are expected to benefit from AI expenditures.