Anthropic commits $11.6 billion to Akamai in seven-year cloud deal

Anthropic will pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years for cloud computing capacity, Akamai said Thursday. The agreement is more than six times the size of a $1.8 billion deal between the two companies that Bloomberg reported in May, and it is the largest contract in Akamai’s history.

The commitment is not guaranteed in full. According to Akamai’s securities filing, the payments depend on Akamai meeting certain delivery and service-availability requirements, and either company can end the agreement under specified conditions.

Much of the new capacity centers on CPUs, the general-purpose chips that handle tasks like running code and browsing the web, rather than the GPUs that dominate most AI infrastructure headlines. Akamai executives pointed to growing demand for CPU capacity as AI agents take on more of that kind of work, though the company did not say specifically what Anthropic plans to use the chips for.

Akamai won’t collect revenue from the deal this year. On an investor call Thursday, executives said they expect between $150 million and $300 million in 2027, starting in the second half of that year, with revenue reaching an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. Building the capacity will cost Akamai roughly $5.5 billion, and the company is adding about $1.7 billion to this year’s capital spending to buy components such as memory ahead of need.

A stake instead of an investment

As part of the deal, Akamai gave Anthropic a warrant, the right to buy shares at a fixed price, for nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, or up to about 5% of Akamai’s outstanding stock, at $111.33 a share. About 2% is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment; the rest unlocks as Anthropic spends more, with each additional $3 billion in commitments adding roughly another 1%. That structure means the deal could eventually grow by as much as $9 billion, to about $20 billion in total.

It is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud contract. The arrangement runs opposite to the more familiar pattern in AI deals, where chipmakers and cloud providers invest directly in the labs buying their products, as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and AMD have all done with Anthropic. Here, the supplier is instead giving up a potential stake in its customer’s business, an approach AMD used with OpenAI last year through warrants tied to chip-purchase milestones. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times in December that Anthropic does not take part in such arrangements at the same scale as some of its rivals.

Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading Thursday. What happens next depends on Akamai hitting the delivery and service benchmarks written into the contract, and on how much further Anthropic decides to commit toward the $20 billion ceiling.