A Content Delivery Network is a geographically distributed system of servers that caches and delivers static and dynamic web content close to the users requesting it. The purpose is to reduce latency, reduce load on origin servers, and improve availability during traffic spikes.
Major CDN providers include Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud CDN. Modern CDNs have evolved beyond simple caching — they now offer edge compute, DDoS protection, bot management, and image optimization as integrated services.
For AI applications, CDNs have become load-bearing for a specific use case: serving model inference close to the user. Cloudflare Workers AI, Fastly Compute, and similar edge-AI services let applications run small-to-medium models at edge locations, reducing latency for real-time use cases where the round trip to a centralized GPU cluster would be too slow.