Anthropic signs $11.6B seven-year cloud deal with Akamai
Anthropic committed $11.6 billion over seven years for Akamai Cloud CPU capacity, with a warrant for about 5% of Akamai's stock and an option to expand to $20B.
Anthropic has agreed to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years for cloud capacity, in the largest contract in Akamai's history. Announced September 24, the deal covers CPU workloads on Akamai Cloud's distributed infrastructure, with an option to expand by up to another $9 billion, for a potential total of around $20 billion.
The structure is as interesting as the headline number. Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for 7.7 million shares, about 5 percent of its common stock, at $111.33 a share. Roughly 2 percent vests with the announced commitment, and the rest vests as the relationship expands: about 1 percent for each additional $3 billion of cloud purchases. In other words, Anthropic gets equity upside if the partnership grows, and Akamai gets a customer financially motivated to stay. Akamai estimates $5.5 billion in capital expenditures tied to the deal, including a $1.7 billion increase in 2026 capex to pre-purchase supply chain components like memory.
The market reaction was immediate: Akamai shares jumped roughly 17 to 20 percent after hours. The company says the deal adds to more than $2.8 billion in multi-year cloud infrastructure commitments announced this year, and it projects revenue from the agreement of $150 to $300 million in the second half of 2027, rising to about $1.7 billion a year by the end of 2028.
The detail worth lingering on is CPU, not GPU. This is not a training-cluster deal; it is about serving inference and agent workloads at scale, which run largely on CPUs. That tracks with where the industry's compute demand is shifting: Anthropic's agent push, including this month's Claude Agents for Business launch, means long-running sessions that hold context and call tools for hours. Those workloads are bursty, geographically spread, and latency-sensitive, which is exactly the shape Akamai's edge network was built for.
There is a real question underneath the celebration, though. Locking in $11.6 billion of CPU capacity is a bet that agent workloads keep growing at roughly their current trajectory for seven years. If model efficiency gains (see: this week's SoL-Pi paper, Anthropic's own 40-percent cost-reduction claims for Opus 5.5) compress the compute per task faster than usage grows, long-dated capacity contracts can turn into expensive commitments. For now, both sides are betting the same way, and the market likes it.
The warrant structure also tells you how confident Akamai is. If Anthropic never expands beyond the initial $11.6 billion, Anthropic still walks away with warrants on roughly 2 percent of Akamai, a meaningful consolation prize. And the deal is part of a bigger pattern: the cloud capacity market is fragmenting into specialists, with neoclouds selling GPU clusters for training while Akamai sells distributed CPU at the edge for inference. Anthropic just placed the largest bet yet that the second market is the one that matters for the agent era.