Akamai is not the first name that comes to mind when you think about AI infrastructure. That’s exactly what makes this deal worth paying attention to. According to TechCrunch, Anthropic has agreed to spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai’s cloud infrastructure, a figure that dwarfs the $1.8 billion deal between the two companies that Bloomberg reported back in May. That’s not a renegotiation. That’s a different kind of bet.
The commitment is conditional. Akamai’s securities filing notes that it depends on meeting specific delivery and service-availability requirements, and either side can exit under certain conditions. So this isn’t money already spent. But the scale of the number is still significant, and Akamai’s stock jumped as much as 17% in after-hours trading Thursday, which says something about how the market is reading it.
What’s interesting here isn’t just the size. It’s what Anthropic is actually buying. The deal centers on CPUs, not the GPUs that dominate most AI infrastructure conversations. General-purpose chips have seen rising demand as AI agents take on more varied tasks, the kind of work that doesn’t map neatly onto GPU-optimized compute. Akamai didn’t specify exactly what Anthropic plans to do with that capacity, but the direction is clear. As AI moves further into agentic workflows, the infrastructure needs start to look less like a single GPU cluster and more like a distributed, mixed-compute stack.
Akamai won’t recognize revenue from the deal this year. Executives said on an investor call Thursday that they expect between $150 million and $300 million in 2027, starting in the second half of the year, with revenue hitting an annual pace of roughly $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. To build out the capacity, Akamai plans to spend about $5.5 billion, and it’s already adding $1.7 billion to this year’s capital spending to buy components like memory ahead of time.
The deal also includes a warrant structure that’s worth understanding. Akamai gave Anthropic the right to buy shares at $111.33 each, covering nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, or roughly 5% of outstanding stock. About 2% vests when Anthropic makes its first payment. The rest is tied to additional spending. Every extra $3 billion Anthropic commits to Akamai’s cloud services unlocks approximately another 1%, meaning the deal could potentially grow to around $20 billion total.
This is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal, and the structure runs counter to the more familiar pattern in AI. Normally, it’s the supplier, the chipmaker or cloud provider, that invests directly in the AI lab it’s selling to. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD have all made or committed to investments in Anthropic while also selling it compute. Here, the supplier is giving its customer a financial stake that grows with spending. AMD used something similar with OpenAI last year, tying warrants to chip-purchase milestones. But for Akamai, this is new territory.
For Anthropic, the deal fits a pattern of locking in compute at scale across multiple vendors rather than concentrating everything with one provider. CEO Dario Amodei said last December that Anthropic doesn’t participate in circular investment arrangements at the same scale as some competitors. But at $11.6 billion, this is clearly not a cautious hedge. It’s a serious infrastructure commitment to a company most people associate with content delivery, not AI.
That’s the real story. Akamai is positioning itself as a serious player in AI compute, and Anthropic is willing to make a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar bet that it can deliver. Whether that pays off depends on execution, but the deal puts Akamai in a different conversation than where it was six months ago.
