Piper says ‘too early’ to know ‘true opportunity’ for CDN vendors from Apple PCC

Piper Sandler notes that Apple (AAPL) unveiled Private Cloud Compute, or PCC, a system designed for private AI processing for requests too large to be handled on device, and there has been strong interest around the opportunity for CDN vendors, particularly for Cloudflare (NET). The firm also notes that when Apple first launched iCloud Private Relay in 2021, Cloudflare, Akamai (AKAM) and Fastly (FSLY) all published blog posts confirming they were “a part of delivering this service,” so Piper sees it as likely that all three of these CDNs will be utilized as the “OHTTP-Relay” referenced in the PCC architecture. After discussing this with all three CDNs that the firm believes are involved, talking with industry experts, and analyzing publications from Apple and CDNs, Piper believes “it is too early to determine the true opportunity,” though the analyst thinks the baseline opportunity is the delivery of encapsulated HTTP requests and likely less than $50M on its own based on likely pricing.