Anthropic to pay Akamai $11.6B over 7 years for cloud
Original: Anthropic to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years in cloud deal
Why This Matters
At $11.6B+, this signals CPU infrastructure — not just GPU clusters — as a serious AI scaling frontier.
Anthropic signed a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud infrastructure deal with Akamai, announced September 25, 2026. The agreement — Akamai's largest ever — is six times the size of a previously reported $1.8 billion deal. Akamai expects $150M–$300M in 2027 revenue, reaching ~$1.7B annually by end of 2028.
Anthropic has committed $11.6 billion over seven years to Akamai's cloud infrastructure in the company's largest contract to date. The deal is contingent on Akamai meeting delivery and service-availability requirements, and either party can exit under certain conditions. Akamai will not recognize revenue from the agreement in 2026; it expects $150 million to $300 million in the second half of 2027, scaling to roughly $1.7 billion per year by end of 2028. To build capacity, Akamai plans to spend about $5.5 billion, and is adding $1.7 billion to this year's capital budget to pre-purchase components including memory. Notably, the deal centers on CPU compute — not GPUs — reflecting growing demand from AI agents for general-purpose processing. As part of the arrangement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares (up to ~5% of outstanding stock) at $111.33 per share. About 2% vests on first payment; each additional $3 billion Anthropic spends unlocks roughly 1% more. The deal could expand to approximately $20 billion total. The warrant structure inverts the typical AI circular-investment pattern: instead of a supplier investing in the AI lab, Akamai is giving its customer a growing equity stake tied to spending milestones — similar to AMD's warrant arrangement with OpenAI in 2025. Akamai shares jumped as much as 17% after hours.