Anthropic Signs $11.6 Billion, Seven-Year Cloud Deal With Akamai

Akamai has announced an $11.6 billion, seven-year agreement to support Anthropic's growing compute needs, one of the largest cloud infrastructure commitments disclosed by either company to date. The deal, confirmed in a press release from Akamai and first reported by TechCrunch, will see Akamai provide distributed infrastructure across thousands of points of presence and a diversified hardware base to support Anthropic's CPU workload growth as it scales Claude and related products.

Akamai CEO Dr. Tom Leighton said in the announcement that “Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai's capabilities” to support infrastructure at scale. The agreement, announced on September 24, is far larger than the roughly $1.8 billion commitment Akamai disclosed in May. The new deal is more than six times the size of that earlier arrangement, according to The Decoder's analysis of Anthropic's broader compute spending.

Why Anthropic Is Using Akamai for CPU Workloads

The agreement stands out because Akamai says the new capacity is intended to support Anthropic’s growing CPU workloads. That makes the deal different from many AI infrastructure agreements centered mainly on GPU capacity for model training. TechCrunch notes that CPUs are increasingly useful for tasks such as running code and browsing the web as AI agents take on more work.

Akamai says its cloud network spans thousands of points of presence and uses a diversified hardware base. The company is using that distributed infrastructure to expand further into AI cloud workloads alongside its traditional content-delivery and security businesses.

Equity alongside the cloud contract

Unlike a typical vendor agreement, the deal is structured to give Akamai equity upside tied to Anthropic's spending. As part of the arrangement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for nonvoting preferred stock that can be converted into approximately 7.7 million common shares, representing as much as 5% of Akamai's outstanding stock, at a strike price of $111.33 per share.

Roughly 2% of the warrant vests when Anthropic makes its first payment. The remaining portion is tied to future spending milestones, with each additional $3 billion in commitments unlocking about another 1% of vesting, according to details reported by The Boston Globe.

That structure means the total contract could expand by as much as $9 billion beyond the initial commitment, taking the potential value of the deal to nearly $20 billion

For Akamai, historically known for content delivery and edge security rather than AI infrastructure, the agreement marks a major expansion of its cloud business and, according to the company, is the largest deal in its history. Akamai said it expects to increase capital expenditures by roughly $1.7 billion in 2026 to secure critical supply-chain components and pre-purchase memory for the Anthropic build-out. Total capital expenditure tied to the $11.6 billion commitment is estimated at approximately $5.5 billion.

Akamai shares rose about 22% in after-hours trading following the announcement, as investors weighed the scale of the new revenue opportunity against the significant spending required to support it.

What Akamai expects to earn from the deal

Akamai has also given investors a rough sense of how the revenue will materialize over time. The company has guided to an initial $150 million to $300 million in Anthropic-related revenue starting in the second half of 2027, ramping toward an annualized pace of roughly $1.7 billion by the end of 2028 as the infrastructure build-out matures and Anthropic's usage scales. That timeline underscores that this is a multi-year infrastructure bet rather than an immediate revenue windfall, with the bulk of the payoff for Akamai still several years out.

The Spending Comes Before Most of the Revenue

Akamai expects to spend heavily before the Anthropic contract reaches its full revenue potential. The company estimates about $5.5 billion in total capital expenditure related to the $11.6 billion commitment, including roughly $1.7 billion in additional 2026 spending to secure critical supply-chain components and pre-purchase memory.

Akamai also said the agreement will have no impact on its 2026 revenue guidance. Revenue from Anthropic is expected to begin in the second half of 2027 and ramp toward an annualized pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.

Part of a broader compute buildout

The Akamai agreement is the latest in a series of infrastructure commitments Anthropic has made as it competes with OpenAI, Google, and others for compute capacity to train and run increasingly capable models. The Decoder reports that Anthropic has signed roughly $517 billion in compute deals over the past eleven months, highlighting the scale of its infrastructure spending.

That spending is especially significant because Anthropic relies heavily on external infrastructure partners rather than owning a hyperscale cloud platform of its own. Reuters reports that the company’s long-term infrastructure commitments include major agreements with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Broadcom, and other partners.

For Anthropic, the deal supports the company's strategy of diversifying its infrastructure partners beyond its primary cloud relationships with Amazon and Google. Using multiple vendors gives the company more sources of compute capacity as demand for Claude grows among enterprise customers.

For Akamai, the agreement is a bet that its edge network, built over two decades to move web traffic around the world, can also serve as part of the infrastructure needed for AI workloads. That would put Akamai in a market currently dominated by hyperscalers and specialized neocloud providers.

Neither company has disclosed the specific hardware mix or data center locations involved in the arrangement, though Akamai's press materials describe the deal as covering “full application lifecycle support in the AI era” built on its existing distributed network. The warrant structure, tying Akamai's equity upside directly to Anthropic's spending, is itself notable: it mirrors a pattern seen elsewhere in the AI infrastructure market, where compute suppliers increasingly accept equity stakes or revenue-sharing arrangements in exchange for committing capital and capacity to a single, fast-growing customer, betting that the customer's long-term trajectory will outweigh the risk of that concentration.