A very boring company might be worth paying attention to
F5 is aiming its products at the surge of AI-related data center investment, and it’s working.
F5 Inc. is getting a moment in the sunshine, as the mind-numbingly boring “application services” company tops the S&P 500 list of performers on Wednesday.
The Seattle company, which has been around since the late 1990s tech boom, sells traffic management and security software that choreographs and combs through data pumping through the server systems that power the internet.
Of course, more recently F5 has been aiming their products at the surge of AI-related data center investment, which has had a healthy effect on the bottom line.
After beating expectations on both the top and bottom line in earnings results reported Tuesday, the company’s CEO, François Locoh-Donou, suggested that demand for the company’s services offerings looked to be relatively robust, even in light of uncertainty introduced by DeepSeek’s open-source models that set off a mini market panic on Monday.
“The stance of F5 is if, in fact, we can have more open-source models that allow more enterprises to adopt AI faster and build their applications and it creates a faster proliferation of AI applications, that is really good news for F5,” he said. “Because it means that we will have more opportunity to do high-performance data delivery for data stores and more opportunity to secure AI workloads. And if, in fact, it is cheaper to build and train these models than we thought it would be, that is also good news because it will accelerate adoption of AI.”
The market seems to have taken him at his word, and the stock isn’t getting the same scrutiny as Nvidia is on Wednesday, perhaps suggesting that investors don’t view its fate as specifically linked to the construction of additional data centers that DeepSeek might put on pause.
F5’s shares are up more than 11% on Wednesday, its third-biggest daily jump in the last decade. The stock is up roughly 25% in the last three months.
