Akamai Technologies' place in the artificial-intelligence trade received a boost after the company announced its latest cloud infrastructure services contract.

Shares rose 7.7% to $127.65 in premarket trading on Friday after the cloud computing company posted second-quarter earnings after the closing bell Thursday. The stock has advanced 36% this year.

While investors pushed the stock higher, the moves had little to do with the second-quarter financial results and everything to with additional evidence that Akamai has cemented itself as an AI infrastructure company.

The highlight out of the company's financial report was that an unnamed U.S. technology company signed a contract for Akamai's cloud infrastructure services, or CIS, worth more than $600 million over four years. Akamai's CIS will be used to "power robotics development," the company said.

Akamai this year has signed multi-year CIS contracts worth a combined $2.8 billion. A major portion of that is a $1.8 billion deal announced in May with a "leading frontier model provider."

"Similar to last quarter, the latest contract provides another proof point supporting the bull case," Evercore ISI analyst Peter Levine wrote Friday. "With management highlighting accelerating CIS pipeline activity, we would not be surprised if additional nine-figure commitments are announced over the coming quarters."

Guggenheim analyst John DiFucci added Friday that the firm believes Akamai's "storied past in providing better performance and security for the internet will serve it well in providing inference at the edge in this new technology paradigm -- AI."

More broadly, the second-quarter report was solid but nothing to take investors' breath away.

Akamai posted adjusted earnings of $1.59 a share, down from $1.73 a year ago and just above Wall Street expectations of $1.57. Revenue grew 5% to $1.1 billion, in line with the analyst consensus.

Looking ahead, the company forecasts third-quarter earnings of $1.60 to $1.80 a share, matching the analyst consensus at the midpoint. The company also narrowed its full-year earnings outlook to $6.40 to $7.05 a share, from its previous $6.40 to $7.15 view.

"The key questions are whether AKAM's current CIS momentum is being driven more by capacity constraints or by a true technology moat and how large the opportunity could ultimately be," Levine added.

Questions remain, but Akamai is trading like a member of the AI trade for now.