Anthropic to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years in cloud deal

Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai’s cloud infrastructure, Akamai said Thursday. That’s more than six times the size of a $1.8 billion deal between the two companies that Bloomberg reported in May. The commitment isn’t ironclad; according to Akamai’s securities filing, it depends on Akamai meeting certain delivery and service-availability requirements, and either company can end the agreement under certain conditions.

The deal is the largest in Akamai’s history and continues Anthropic’s compute gobbling-streak. It also represents a bet on a less-hyped corner of AI infrastructure: CPUs. Demand for CPUs, the general-purpose chips that handle work like running code and browsing the web, has grown as AI agents take on more tasks, though Akamai didn’t say what Anthropic will use them for. 

Akamai won’t see revenue from the deal this year. On an investor call Thursday, executives said they expect $150 million to $300 million in 2027, starting in the second half, with revenue reaching an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. 

To build out the capacity, Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion. It is also adding about $1.7 billion to this year’s capital spending to buy components such as memory in advance. 

As part of the deal, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant, essentially the right to buy shares at a set price, for nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, or up to about 5% of the company’s outstanding stock, at $111.33 a share. About 2% is expected to vest, or become available to Anthropic once it makes its first payment under the deal. The rest is tied to Anthropic spending more. Each additional $3 billion it commits to Akamai’s cloud services unlocks roughly another 1%, so the deal could grow by as much as $9 billion, to about $20 billion in total.

It’s the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal, and the contract is the largest in company history, Bloomberg reported.

The warrant flips the more common pattern in circular AI deals, in which suppliers — chipmakers and cloud providers — invest directly in the AI labs that buy their products. Here, the supplier is instead giving its customer a potential stake, one that grows as Anthropic’s spending with Akamai does. AMD used a similar structure with OpenAI last year, tying warrants to chip-purchase milestones. 

Anthropic is no stranger to such arrangements. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD have all invested or agreed to invest in the company while 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.”

Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported.