Anthropic has agreed to allocate $11.6 billion over a seven-year period for cloud infrastructure supplied by Akamai, according to the provider’s announcement on Thursday. The commitment is more than six times larger than the $1.8 billion arrangement reported between the two firms earlier this year, and it marks the biggest contract in Akamai’s corporate history.
The agreement is not unconditional; Akamai’s securities filing indicates that payment depends on the company meeting specific delivery and service-availability benchmarks, and either party retains the right to terminate under defined circumstances. This clause introduces performance-based safeguards for both Anthropic and Akamai, ensuring that the substantial spend aligns with operational expectations throughout the term.
Akamai does not anticipate recognizing any revenue from the deal in the current fiscal year. Executives projected earnings of $150 million to $300 million in the second half of 2027, with annualized revenue climbing to roughly $1.7 billion by the close of 2028. To support the new capacity, the company plans to invest about $5.5 billion in infrastructure and has added $1.7 billion to this year’s capital budget for advance component purchases such as memory.
As part of the contract, Akamai granted Anthropic a warrant to purchase non-voting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, representing up to about five percent of Anthropic’s outstanding equity at a price of $111.33 per share. Approximately two percent of the warrant is expected to vest after the first payment, while additional vesting is tied to further spending, with each extra $3 billion unlocking roughly one percent more equity.
The inclusion of a warrant reverses the more common pattern in AI-related cloud deals, where suppliers such as chipmakers and cloud providers take equity stakes in the labs they serve. Akamai’s approach mirrors a similar arrangement AMD employed with OpenAI last year, linking warrants to chip-purchase milestones. Anthropic has previously received investments from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and AMD alongside hardware and cloud agreements, though its CEO has said the company does not engage at the same scale as some peers.
Following the announcement, Akamai’s share price rose as much as 17 percent in after-hours trading, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The deal underscores growing demand for general-purpose CPUs, which are increasingly tasked with running AI agents alongside traditional workloads, even though Akamai did not disclose the specific applications Anthropic will run on the hardware.