Akamai announced Thursday that Anthropic will invest $11.6 billion over seven years in Akamai’s cloud infrastructure. This is more than six times the size of the $1.8 billion deal between the two companies that Bloomberg reported in May. This approach is not ironclad. It depends on Akamai meeting certain delivery and service availability requirements, and either company can terminate the agreement under certain conditions, according to Akamai’s securities filing.
The deal is the largest in Akamai’s history and continues Anthropic’s compute gobbling streak. This is also a bet on a less touted part of AI infrastructure: the CPU. Demand for CPUs, general-purpose chips that handle tasks like running code and browsing the web, is increasing as AI agents take on more tasks, but Akamai hasn’t said what Anthropic will use the CPUs for.
Akamai is not expected to receive any revenue from the deal this year. On Thursday’s investor conference call, executives said they expect revenue of $150 million to $300 million starting in the second half of 2027, and that they expect sales to reach an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.
Akamai plans to spend approximately $5.5 billion to increase capacity. The company also plans to add about $1.7 billion to its capital expenditures this year to pre-purchase components such as memory.
As part of the transaction, Akamai issued to Anthropic 7.7 million shares of common stock at a price of $111.33 per share, or warrants that are essentially the right to purchase stock at a set price of non-voting preferred stock convertible into up to approximately 5% of the company’s outstanding stock. Approximately 2% is expected to vest or become available to Anthropic upon Anthropic’s first payment under the agreement. The rest is tied to further human spending. For every $3 billion added to Akamai’s cloud services, approximately 1% will be unlocked, potentially increasing the deal by up to $9 billion for a total of approximately $20 billion.
According to Bloomberg, this is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud contract, and the contract is the largest in the company’s history.
The warrant reverses the more common pattern of circular AI deals, where suppliers (chip makers and cloud providers) invest directly in the AI labs that buy their products. Here, the supplier is instead offering potential equity to the customer, and that equity grows as Anthropic spends with Akamai. AMD adopted a similar structure with OpenAI last year, tying warrants to chip purchase milestones.
Anthropic is no stranger to such arrangements. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD all invest in or have agreed to invest in the company, while selling chips and cloud capacity to the company. CEO Dario Amodei told the New York Times in December that Anthropic is not participating in these deals “at the same scale as some of the other players.”
Akamai stock rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported.
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