Anthropic has agreed to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years for cloud infrastructure, Akamai announced Thursday. The commitment is more than six times the $1.8 billion deal Bloomberg reported in May. According to Akamai's securities filing, the deal is conditional on Akamai meeting delivery and service-availability requirements, and either company can exit under certain conditions. It is the largest contract in Akamai's history.
The deal is a bet on CPUs, the general-purpose chips that handle tasks such as running code and serving web traffic. Akamai did not say what Anthropic will use the capacity for, but demand for CPUs has grown as AI agents take on more tasks. Akamai expects no revenue this year, then $150 million to $300 million in 2027 starting in the second half, reaching an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. To support the buildout, Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion and is 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 for nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, or up to about 5% of outstanding stock, at $111.33 a share. About 2% is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment; each additional $3 billion in commitments unlocks roughly another 1%, so the deal could grow by as much as $9 billion to about $20 billion. It is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal, inverting the more common pattern in which suppliers invest in AI labs. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times last December that Anthropic does not participate in such circular deals at the "same scale as some other players." Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading.