Back in May, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic had a $1.8 billion deal with Akamai. The real number is more than six times that. Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai’s cloud infrastructure, Akamai said Thursday.
That makes it the largest deal in Akamai’s history. It also shows Anthropic is still buying up compute as fast as it can. The chips involved are more interesting than the size of the check, though.
The quiet bet on CPUs
Most AI infrastructure coverage is about GPUs. This deal is about CPUs, the general-purpose chips that handle work like running code and browsing the web.
Demand for those chips has grown as AI agents take on more tasks. Akamai didn’t say what Anthropic will use them for, so any guess about the workload is only a guess.
Read the fine print before you treat $11.6 billion as money in the bank. According to Akamai’s securities filing, the commitment depends on Akamai meeting certain delivery and service-availability requirements. Either company can end the agreement under certain conditions.
A supplier handing its customer equity
The odd part of the deal is the warrant. Akamai gave Anthropic the right to buy shares at a set price, in the form of nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares. That’s up to about 5% of the company’s outstanding stock, at $111.33 a share.
About 2% is expected to vest, meaning it becomes available to Anthropic, once Anthropic makes its first payment under the deal. The rest depends on Anthropic spending more. Each additional $3 billion it commits to Akamai’s cloud services unlocks roughly another 1%. That means the deal could grow by as much as $9 billion, to about $20 billion in total.
Bloomberg reported that it’s the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal.
It also runs the usual circular AI deal in reverse. Normally the suppliers, meaning chipmakers and cloud providers, invest directly in the AI labs that buy their products. Here the supplier hands its customer a potential stake, and that stake grows as Anthropic spends more with Akamai. There’s one clear precedent: last year AMD gave OpenAI a similar structure, with warrants tied to chip-purchase milestones.
Anthropic has done this before
Deals like this are familiar ground for Anthropic. 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 last December that Anthropic does not participate in these deals at the “same scale as some other players.” An $11.6 billion contract that could stretch to $20 billion makes that line harder to argue.
Akamai pays up front and waits for revenue
Akamai won’t book any revenue from the deal this year. On an investor call Thursday, executives said they expect $150 million to $300 million in 2027, starting in the second half. They expect revenue to reach an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.
The spending starts much sooner. Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion building out the capacity. It’s also adding about $1.7 billion to this year’s capital spending so it can buy components such as memory in advance.
So Akamai is putting billions into hardware now for revenue that doesn’t start until the second half of next year, on a contract either side can exit. Investors didn’t seem worried. Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported.
