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

Anthropic commits $11.6 billion to Akamai

Anthropic has agreed to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years for cloud infrastructure, in what Bloomberg reports is the largest contract in Akamai's history. According to TechCrunch, the figure is more than six times the size of a $1.8 billion arrangement between the two companies that Bloomberg reported in May.

The commitment comes with strings attached. Akamai's securities filing, cited by TechCrunch, shows the deal depends on Akamai meeting certain delivery and service-availability requirements, and either company can terminate the agreement under specified conditions.

A bet on CPUs rather than GPUs

The deal is notable for which part of the hardware stack it targets. TechCrunch reports it represents a wager on CPUs — the general-purpose chips that handle workloads such as running code and serving web traffic. Demand for these processors has climbed as AI agents take on more tasks, though Akamai did not disclose what Anthropic will use the capacity for.

Slow revenue now, heavy spending ahead

Akamai expects no revenue from the contract this year. On an investor call Thursday, executives said they anticipate $150 million to $300 million in 2027, starting in the second half of the 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 purchase components such as memory in advance.

A warrant that grows with Anthropic's spending

Alongside the contract, Akamai granted Anthropic a warrant for nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares — up to roughly 5% of Akamai's outstanding stock — at $111.33 a share. About 2% of that is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment, and the remainder unlocks as spending rises: each additional $3 billion Anthropic commits to Akamai's cloud services releases roughly another 1%. That mechanism could expand the deal by as much as $9 billion, to around $20 billion in total.

Bloomberg reported that this is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal.

The structure inverts the circular financing that has characterized AI infrastructure agreements, in which chipmakers and cloud providers invest directly in the AI labs that buy from them. Here, the supplier is instead giving its customer a potential equity stake that increases with spending. AMD used a comparable structure with OpenAI last year, tying warrants to chip-purchase milestones.

Anthropic has frequently been on the receiving end of such arrangements: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and AMD have all invested in, or agreed to invest in, the company while also selling it chips or cloud capacity. CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times last December that Anthropic does not participate in these deals at the “same scale as some other players.”

Investors welcomed the announcement. Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Why it matters

A single AI customer committing $11.6 billion over seven years illustrates how sharply compute demand is reshaping cloud provider economics. Akamai, a company long associated with content delivery, is committing billions in capital against one tenant's projected needs, with revenue arriving only gradually and the contract itself contingent on hitting delivery targets.

The warrant structure also points to a new pattern in AI dealmaking: instead of vendors buying equity in their customers, vendors are granting customers equity in themselves, aligning both parties around ever-larger spending. And the emphasis on CPUs suggests the AI buildout is spreading beyond GPUs into the everyday infrastructure that agents need to run code and serve users — a less hyped but fast-growing slice of the market.