Akamai headquarters, 145 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts Credit: Akamai Anthropic has signed an $11.6bn, seven-year agreement to use Akamai’s cloud infrastructure, Akamai announced after the US market closed on Thursday. The deal can grow by a further $9bn, which would take the total to about $20bn. As part of the deal, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for 7.7 million shares on an as-converted basis, about 5% of its common stock. The exercise price is $111.33.
The warrant takes the form of non-voting convertible Series B preferred stock. About 2% vests with the $11.6bn commitment. The remaining 3% vests only if the expansion happens, at 1% for every $3bn of extra services. Akamai will supply Anthropic with access to central processing units (CPUs), Bloomberg’s Lynn Doan reported.
The contract builds on a $1.8bn deal the two companies signed in May. Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in late trading, to $129.60, according to Bloomberg. “Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale,” said Tom Leighton, Akamai’s CEO and co-founder. What Akamai is spending Akamai expects to spend about $5.5bn in capital to serve the contract. It is raising its 2026 capital spending by about $1.7bn to pre-buy supplies, including memory.
The company said the deal does not change its 2026 revenue guidance. According to Bloomberg, the $5.5bn is more than six times what Akamai spent on capital in all of 2025. Leighton told Bloomberg the contract should start in the second half of next year. He expects $150m to $300m in revenue from Anthropic next year, rising to an annual run rate of about $1.7bn by 2028.
Leighton also told Bloomberg this is the first time Akamai has agreed to a warrant as part of a cloud deal with a customer. “It’s a serious step, but I think in this case it made sense to do,” Leighton told Bloomberg. “It helps bring the companies together.” Some Wall Street investors have raised concerns about so-called circular AI deals, Bloomberg noted. In those deals, companies that buy each other’s products also invest in one another, which critics say makes real demand for AI harder to measure. Anthropic’s compute deals The Akamai contract adds to a run of compute agreements by Anthropic this year. It signed a $10bn deal with Volta in August.
In September, The Information reported that Anthropic is the customer behind Rum Group’s $13.7bn compute contract. Anthropic also signed its first Australian data centre lease. Bloomberg reported that it has also secured chips from Google and SpaceX. Anthropic was not quoted in Akamai’s announcement.
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