Anthropic has committed $11.6 billion over seven years to use Akamai’s cloud infrastructure, Akamai said on Thursday. That commitment is substantially larger than a $1.8 billion agreement between the two companies reported by Bloomberg in May.
The agreement is not unconditional: according to Akamai’s securities filing, the commitment depends on Akamai meeting certain delivery and service-availability requirements, and either party can terminate the arrangement under specified conditions.
Why the deal matters
Akamai says this is the largest deal in its history, and it continues Anthropic’s pattern of heavy compute demand. The contract also highlights interest in a less-discussed segment of AI infrastructure: CPUs. Demand for CPUs — general-purpose processors used for running code and web workloads — has risen as AI agents take on more tasks, although Akamai did not specify the particular uses Anthropic will put these CPUs to.
Revenue timing and capital spending
Akamai does not expect to recognize revenue from the deal this year. On a Thursday investor call, company executives said they expect $150 million to $300 million of revenue in 2027, starting in the second half of the year, with revenue ramping to an annual run rate of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.
To expand capacity, Akamai expects to spend roughly $5.5 billion. The company is also adding about $1.7 billion to this year’s capital expenditures to pre-purchase components such as memory.
Warrant and potential expansion
As part of the agreement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant that gives Anthropic the right to buy nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares — roughly 5% of Akamai’s outstanding shares — at $111.33 per share. About 2% of that stake is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment under the deal; the remainder vests as Anthropic spends more. For each additional $3 billion Anthropic commits to Akamai’s cloud services, roughly another 1% becomes available, meaning the arrangement could grow by up to $9 billion and reach about $20 billion in total.
This is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal, and Bloomberg reported that the contract is the largest in company history.
How this compares to other circular deals
The warrant structure reverses a more common pattern in circular AI deals, in which suppliers such as chipmakers and cloud providers make investments directly in the AI labs that buy their products. Here, the supplier is giving its customer a potential equity stake that expands as the customer’s spending increases. AMD used a similar structure with OpenAI last year, linking warrants to chip-purchase milestones.
Anthropic has previously been involved in similar arrangements: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD have all invested in or agreed to invest in Anthropic while selling chips or cloud capacity to the company. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times in December that Anthropic does not participate in these deals "at the same scale as some other players."
Market reaction
The Wall Street Journal reported that Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday.
Conclusion
The Anthropic–Akamai agreement represents a sizable, conditional commitment that will require significant capital expenditure from Akamai and introduces a warrant-linked structure to a cloud services deal. It underscores growing demand across different types of compute resources for AI workloads, including CPU-based capacity.
