2021 Sustainability Report

Letter from the Global Director of Corporate Sustainability

In the early days of the internet, Akamai set out to solve the “World Wide Wait.” Two decades later, we are still hard at work solving the significant performance and security challenges that remain.

Akamai’s purpose is to make the world a better place for billions of people, billions of times a day. This purpose permeates our culture, underscoring our company values across all our stakeholder groups. Environmental sustainability is core to our mission.

Environmental sustainability is not new to us. We have been working on creating a more sustainable enterprise since 2009. In 2015, we set ambitious goals — to reduce our emissions by 30% year over year, power our network with 50% renewable energy, and recycle 100% of our e-waste — all by the end of 2020. Our achievement of these goals set the stage for even more ambitious plans for the future.

In 2021, we took the next step in living our values, embarking on our environmental, social, and governance (ESG) journey. We established a formal ESG office to develop and execute a cohesive ESG strategy, with the primary environmental objective of ushering in an emissions-free Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform powered by 100% renewable energy by 2030.

To realize this ambition, we developed five new sustainability goals that focus on three areas of our business: the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform, the communities in which we live and work, and our global supply chain.

Our five new goals are ambitious. These goals have set the stage for us to contribute to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and pledge our support for Business Ambition for 1.5°C under the Science-Based Targets initiative. Our 2030 goals were assembled to inspire innovation and build a more environmentally friendly internet to benefit all of Akamai’s stakeholders worldwide.

We can’t do it alone. It’s essential that we look beyond our own operations to partner with our suppliers on taking sustainable action. We firmly believe that the opportunity for real, sustainable progress is an industry-wide one. Only working together, as a collective driving force, can we truly help build a more sustainable internet for all.

Mike Mattera
Global Director of Corporate Sustainability