Anthropic has agreed to allocate $11.6 billion over a seven-year period for Akamai’s cloud infrastructure, according to a statement from Akamai on Thursday. The figure exceeds the $1.8 billion arrangement reported earlier by Bloomberg by more than sixfold. The commitment is conditional on Akamai meeting specific delivery and service-availability standards, and either party may terminate the contract under defined circumstances, as disclosed in Akamai’s securities filing.
The agreement is the largest contract in Akamai’s history and continues Anthropic’s rapid expansion of compute capacity. It also signals a strategic focus on CPUs, the general-purpose processors that handle tasks such as code execution and web browsing, whose demand is rising as AI agents assume broader responsibilities. Akamai did not reveal the precise workloads Anthropic intends to run on the CPUs.
Akamai does not anticipate generating revenue from the deal during the current fiscal year. In an investor call, executives projected earnings of $150 million to $300 million in 2027, beginning in the second half of that year, with annual revenue climbing to roughly $1.7 billion by the close of 2028 as the partnership scales.
To support the new capacity, Akamai plans to invest about $5.5 billion in infrastructure upgrades. The company is also augmenting this year’s capital expenditures by $1.7 billion to procure components such as memory ahead of time, ensuring the necessary hardware is in place for Anthropic’s anticipated usage.
A distinctive element of the deal is a warrant issued by Akamai that grants Anthropic the right to purchase non-voting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, representing roughly five percent of Akamai’s outstanding equity at a price of $111.33 per share. Approximately two percent of the warrant will vest after Anthropic’s initial payment, with further vesting linked to spending milestones,each additional $3 billion of cloud spend unlocks about one percent more, potentially expanding the total contract value to near $20 billion.
This is the first instance of Akamai attaching a warrant to a cloud services agreement, reversing the more common pattern where chipmakers and cloud providers invest directly in AI labs. A similar structure was employed by AMD with OpenAI last year, tying warrant issuance to chip-purchase thresholds, highlighting a growing trend of performance-based equity components in AI supply contracts.
Anthropic has previously received investments from major technology firms, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and AMD, alongside the provision of chips or cloud capacity. CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times that Anthropic does not engage in these arrangements at the same scale as some other players, underscoring a more measured approach to external financing.
Following the announcement, Akamai’s share price jumped as much as 17 percent in after-hours trading, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.