Anthropic commits $11.6B to Akamai in largest cloud deal in its history

Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai’s cloud infrastructure, Akamai said Thursday — 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-buying streak. It’s also a bet on a less-hyped corner of AI infrastructure: CPUs, the general-purpose chips that handle tasks like running code and browsing the web, and whose demand has grown as AI agents take on more work — 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, and it’s adding about $1.7 billion to this year’s capital budget to buy components like memory in advance.

As part of the deal, Akamai gave Anthropic a warrant — the right to buy nonvoting preferred stock, convertible into 7.7 million common shares, or up to about 5% of Akamai’s outstanding stock, at $111.33 a share. About 2% is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment; the rest depends on further spending, with each additional $3 billion Anthropic commits unlocking 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 Bloomberg reported the contract is the largest in the company’s history.

The structure flips the more familiar pattern in circular AI deals, where suppliers invest directly in the labs that buy their products — here, the supplier hands its customer a stake that grows with spending, similar to a structure AMD used with OpenAI last year tied to chip-purchase milestones. Anthropic already has such arrangements with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD, which have invested in or agreed to invest in the company while selling it chips or cloud capacity; CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times in December that Anthropic doesn’t participate in these deals at “the same scale as some other players.” Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Why it matters

The warrant structure gives cloud and chip suppliers a new way to bind AI labs to long-term spending commitments while sharing in their upside — a template that could spread further as compute providers compete for a shrinking pool of top-tier AI customers.