Anthropic has committed to spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai Technologies' cloud infrastructure, a deal that underscores how quickly the artificial intelligence industry's infrastructure needs are expanding beyond the high-profile race for advanced graphics chips.
Akamai disclosed the agreement on Thursday, saying it is the largest contract in the company's history. The size of the commitment is more than six times larger than the $1.8 billion deal between the two companies that Bloomberg reported in May, and it arrives as AI developers continue to lock in enormous amounts of computing capacity to support increasingly capable models and agentic systems.
The deal is not fully guaranteed. According to Akamai's securities filing, the commitment depends on Akamai meeting certain delivery and service-availability requirements, and either company can terminate the agreement under certain conditions. Even so, the scale of the arrangement signals confidence from Anthropic that its compute needs will continue to rise sharply over the next several years.
The agreement also highlights a less-hyped but strategically important corner of the AI infrastructure market: CPUs. While much of the public attention in AI has centered on GPUs, the general-purpose processors that power a wide range of computing tasks are becoming more valuable as AI agents take on more work that resembles ordinary software execution, web browsing and code running. Akamai did not say what Anthropic will use the CPUs for, but the company's disclosure suggests the demand is tied to the broader shift toward agentic AI workloads.
Akamai said it does not expect to recognize revenue from the deal this year. On an investor call Thursday, executives said they anticipate revenue of between $150 million and $300 million in 2027, beginning in the second half of that year, and expect the arrangement to reach an annualized pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. To support the buildout, Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion, and it is adding roughly $1.7 billion to this year's capital spending to buy components such as memory in advance.
The contract is also notable for its unusual financial structure. As part of the deal, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant — effectively 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 a share. About 2% is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment under the deal. The rest is tied to additional spending, with each extra $3 billion committed to Akamai's cloud services unlocking roughly another 1%. In total, the arrangement could grow by as much as $9 billion, pushing the overall value to about $20 billion.
It is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal, and the structure reflects the increasingly circular nature of AI financing and supply relationships. In many such arrangements, suppliers such as chipmakers and cloud providers invest directly in the AI companies that buy their products. Here, the dynamic is reversed: the supplier is granting its customer a potential stake that becomes more valuable as the customer spends more. AMD used a similar structure with OpenAI last year, tying warrants to chip-purchase milestones.
Anthropic is already familiar with these kinds of arrangements. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and AMD have all invested in, or agreed to invest in, the company while also selling it chips or cloud capacity. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei told The New York Times in December that the company does not participate in such deals at the "same scale as some other players." The Akamai agreement suggests that, even if Anthropic remains comparatively selective, its infrastructure commitments are still reaching extraordinary levels.
Investors appeared to welcome the news. Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal, reflecting optimism that the company may be carving out a larger role in the AI infrastructure stack.
For Akamai, long known for content delivery and edge networking, the deal represents a major expansion of ambition. For Anthropic, it is another sign that the company's growth strategy is inseparable from the race to secure enough compute to keep pace with model development and deployment. And for the broader AI industry, the agreement is a reminder that the next phase of the boom may depend not only on the most powerful chips, but also on the less celebrated infrastructure that keeps increasingly autonomous systems running at scale.