Anthropic's $11.6 Billion Bet on Akamai—and on CPUs
Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai's cloud infrastructure, Akamai announced Thursday. That's more than six times the size of a $1.8 billion deal between the two companies that Bloomberg reported in May 2026.
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 terminate the agreement under specified conditions.
A Bet on CPUs, Not Just GPUs
The deal is the largest in Akamai's history and extends Anthropic's compute-gobbling streak. It also represents a bet on a less-hyped corner of AI infrastructure: CPUs.
Demand for CPUs—the general-purpose chips that handle work like running code and browsing the web—has grown as AI agents take on more tasks. Akamai did not specify what Anthropic will use the CPUs for.
Revenue Timeline: Nothing in 2026, Ramp Through 2028
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, beginning in the second half, with revenue reaching an annual run rate of roughly $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.
To build out the capacity, Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion. It is also adding roughly $1.7 billion to this year's capital spending to purchase components such as memory in advance.
The Warrant: How the Deal Could Grow to $20 Billion
As part of the agreement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant—essentially the right to buy shares at a set price—for nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, or up to about 5% of the company's outstanding stock, at $111.33 per share.
About 2% is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment under the deal. The remainder is tied to Anthropic spending more. Each additional $3 billion committed to Akamai's cloud services unlocks roughly another 1%, meaning the deal could grow by as much as $9 billion—to approximately $20 billion in total.
It's the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal, and the contract is the largest in company history, Bloomberg reported.
Flipping the Circular AI Deal
The warrant inverts the more common pattern in circular AI deals, in which suppliers—chipmakers and cloud providers—invest directly in the AI labs that buy their products. Here, the supplier is instead granting its customer a potential stake, one that grows as Anthropic's spending with Akamai increases. AMD used a similar structure with OpenAI in 2025, tying warrants to chip-purchase milestones.
Anthropic is no stranger to such arrangements. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD have all invested or agreed to invest in the company while selling it chips or cloud capacity. CEO Dario Amodei told the New York Times in December 2025 that Anthropic does not participate in these deals at the "same scale as some other players."
Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading following the announcement.
via TechCrunch AI