Anthropic Signs $11.6 Billion Cloud Infrastructure Deal With Akamai

Anthropic has entered into a seven-year agreement to utilize Akamai Technologies' cloud infrastructure, committing at least $11.6 billion to the partnership. The deal, which represents the largest contract in Akamai's history, is designed to support Anthropic's growing demand for CPU-based computing power, a segment of AI infrastructure often overshadowed by GPU-focused investments. The agreement includes provisions for an additional $9 billion in spending, potentially bringing the total value to approximately $20 billion.

Strategic Equity and Warrant Structure

In a departure from standard industry practices where suppliers invest in AI labs, Akamai has issued Anthropic a warrant for non-voting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares. This stake represents up to 5% of Akamai's outstanding stock at an exercise price of $111.33 per share. Approximately 2% of this equity vests upon the first payment, with the remaining 3% tied to incremental spending milestones of $3 billion each. This structure serves as a performance-based incentive and a form of capacity insurance for Anthropic, ensuring the availability of distributed infrastructure as its AI agent workloads scale.

Akamai's security platform demonstrates consistent resilience while its compute segment gains commercial traction as enterprises and hyperscalers seek distributed, low-latency AI inference infrastructure. Meanwhile, some Wall Street investors have raised concerns regarding circular AI deals where participating companies invest in one another.

Financial and Operational Implications

Akamai expects to invest roughly $5.5 billion in capital expenditures to build the capacity required for the contract. The company has also allocated an additional $1.7 billion in 2026 capital spending to secure supply chain components, specifically memory, in advance of the deployment. While the deal is substantial, Akamai does not anticipate immediate revenue impact, projecting initial contributions of $150 million to $300 million in the second half of 2027, with an annual run rate of approximately $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.

Infrastructure Focus

While many AI infrastructure investments prioritize GPU clusters for model training, this partnership focuses on distributed CPU capacity. Akamai's existing network, which spans thousands of global points of presence from core data centers to edge locations, is being repurposed to handle the operational demands of running AI agents. The commitment is contingent upon Akamai meeting specific service-availability and delivery requirements, with both parties retaining termination rights under defined conditions. The deal marks a significant pivot for Akamai, transitioning its business model from a mature content delivery network to a primary supplier of AI-ready compute infrastructure.