Anthropic Akamai cloud deal hits $11.6 billion as Akamai stock jumps 17%

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Anthropic has agreed to spend $11.6 billion over seven years on cloud infrastructure supplied by Akamai, marking one of the largest computing contracts an AI company has ever signed with a single vendor. Akamai confirmed the agreement on Thursday, and the numbers alone explain why the tech and finance world took notice: this Anthropic Akamai cloud deal is more than six times the size of an earlier $1.8 billion arrangement between the two companies that Bloomberg had reported back in May.

Key takeaways

Anthropic will pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years for cloud infrastructure access, the largest contract in Akamai’s history.
The deal is more than six times larger than a previously reported $1.8 billion agreement between the companies.
Akamai expects no revenue in 2026, then $150 million to $300 million in 2027, ramping to about $1.7 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2028.
Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant convertible into roughly 5% of its shares at $111.33 apiece, with the deal potentially growing to about $20 billion if Anthropic spends more.
The contract depends on Akamai meeting delivery and service-availability benchmarks, and either side can terminate it under certain conditions.

Anthropic’s $11.6 Billion Commitment Dwarfs the Original Akamai Contract

The scale of this agreement stands out even in an industry accustomed to eye-watering AI infrastructure spending. Anthropic‘s commitment isn’t a one-time payment but a seven-year pledge, structured to give Akamai a long runway to build out the systems Anthropic needs.

What makes the jump notable is the contrast with where this partnership started. Just months earlier, in May, Bloomberg reported a $1.8 billion deal between the two firms. The new figure represents more than six times that amount, a signal that Anthropic’s appetite for compute has accelerated sharply since then. Akamai has called it the largest deal in the company’s history, a distinction that underscores how much weight a single AI customer can now carry for a cloud and infrastructure provider.

Why the Contract Isn’t a Sure Thing

Despite its size, the agreement comes with built-in guardrails rather than an unconditional guarantee. According to Akamai’s securities filing, the deal depends on Akamai actually meeting specific delivery and service-availability requirements — meaning the company has to prove it can deliver the infrastructure on schedule and keep it running reliably.

Either company can walk away under certain conditions, a detail that tempers how investors should read the headline number. This matters for anyone tracking the broader AI cloud infrastructure market: massive multi-year contracts increasingly come wrapped in performance clauses rather than fixed, no-exit commitments.

Revenue Won’t Show Up Right Away

Akamai told investors on a call Thursday that it won’t book any revenue from the arrangement in 2026. The company projects revenue of $150 million to $300 million in 2027, starting in the back half of that year, before scaling up to an annualized pace of roughly $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.

Akamai’s Capital Bet: Billions in New Spending

To make good on its side of the bargain, Akamai says it plans to spend about $5.5 billion building out capacity. On top of that, the company is adding roughly $1.7 billion to this year’s capital budget specifically to lock in components like memory before prices or supply tighten further.

This is a meaningful financial stretch for a company whose core business has historically centered on content delivery and cybersecurity rather than large-scale AI compute. The size of the capital outlay shows how far infrastructure providers are willing to go to secure a foothold in the AI buildout — and how much leverage a customer like Anthropic now holds in these negotiations.

The Warrant That Flips the Usual Script

Perhaps the most unusual part of the Anthropic Akamai cloud deal is the equity arrangement attached to it. As part of the deal, Akamai granted Anthropic a warrant — essentially the right to purchase shares at a set price — covering nonvoting preferred stock that can be converted into 7.7 million common shares, equivalent to as much as roughly 5% of Akamai’s outstanding stock, priced at $111.33 per share.

About 2% of that stake is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment under the contract. The rest is tied directly to future spending: each additional $3 billion Anthropic commits to Akamai’s cloud services unlocks roughly another 1% of the warrant. If Anthropic keeps spending at that pace, the total deal could swell by as much as $9 billion, pushing the overall value toward $20 billion. Bloomberg reported that this marks the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud contract, and confirmed the deal as the largest in the company’s history.

News of the arrangement moved markets almost immediately. The Wall Street Journal reported that Akamai shares jumped as much as 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday following the announcement.

A Bet on CPUs and a Reversal of the Usual AI Investment Pattern

Unlike many headline AI infrastructure deals built around GPUs, this one leans on CPUs — the general-purpose chips that handle everyday computing tasks like running code and browsing the web. Demand for CPUs has quietly grown as AI agents take on more operational tasks, though Akamai has not disclosed exactly what Anthropic intends to run on them.

Why this matters: most circular AI deals follow a familiar pattern where chipmakers and cloud providers invest directly in the AI labs buying their products. This arrangement flips that script. Instead of the supplier putting money into the customer, Akamai is handing its customer a potential equity stake that grows in step with Anthropic’s own spending. AMD used a comparable structure with OpenAI last year, tying warrants to chip-purchase milestones rather than cloud spending.

Such arrangements are nothing new for Anthropic, since Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD have each invested — or committed to invest — in the company even as they also supply it with chips or cloud infrastructure. Still, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times last December that his company doesn’t participate in these deals at the “same scale as some other players,” a comment that now sits alongside a growing list of multibillion-dollar contracts, including a separate $45 billion arrangement with NScale.

What This Means for the AI Infrastructure Race

The structure of this deal offers a window into how leverage is shifting in the AI compute market. When a customer can extract equity from its own supplier simply by committing to spend more, it suggests AI labs like Anthropic are negotiating from a position of real strength — not just as buyers, but as partners whose continued business is valuable enough to warrant a stake.

For Akamai, the payoff is delayed but potentially transformative: a company built on content delivery and security now stands to become a materially larger player in AI infrastructure revenue by 2028, assuming it clears the delivery benchmarks tied to the contract. Whether the warrant’s growth mechanism plays out to its full $20 billion potential will depend entirely on how much more Anthropic decides to spend in the years ahead.