Anthropic has signed a seven-year contract worth $11.6 billion with the cloud provider Akamai – the largest order in the cloud provider’s history. An extension option of an additional $9 billion could bring the total volume to around $20 billion. In return, Anthropic receives a warrant for up to five percent of Akamai shares.
Warrant secures Anthropic up to five percent of Akamai
The warrant entitles Anthropic to purchase preferred shares that can be converted into up to 7.7 million Akamai common shares – about five percent of the outstanding shares, at an exercise price of $111.33 per share. The unlocking occurs according to the company’s SEC filing in four tranches: 40 percent will be due with the first payment, the remaining three tranches of 20 percent each only when Anthropic concludes additional contracts of $3 billion each. This is the first time that Akamai has linked a cloud deal with a warrant. Investors reacted significantly: Akamai’s stock rose by about twenty percent in after-hours trading. The volume exceeds a previous contract announced in May 2026 between the two companies worth $1.8 billion by more than six times. Akamai co-founder and CEO Tom Leighton stated that Anthropic is driving the AI revolution and Akamai is pleased that the company has chosen its capabilities.
Akamai provides CPU capacity instead of training hardware
Unlike many of Anthropic’s previous billion-dollar deals, the Akamai contract does not revolve around GPU clusters for training, but rather distributed cloud infrastructure for CPU workloads. Akamai operates thousands of access points worldwide and provides Anthropic with managed computing capacity and support services. According to Akamai, the contract entails estimated capital expenditures of approximately $5.5 billion for the base agreement, with an additional $1.7 billion to be invested in the pre-purchase of supply chain components such as memory. The company expects significant revenue from the contract no earlier than the second half of 2027; by the end of 2028, the annual run rate is expected to be around $1.7 billion. The deal does not change the company’s revenue forecast for 2026. The time gap between contract signing and noticeable revenue shows how long-term such infrastructure pre-commitments are – a bet on both sides for sustained high demand for computing power for AI applications.
Contract joins Anthropic’s series of billion-dollar computing deals
The Akamai contract is not Anthropic’s first foray into external computing capacity this year. In August, the company had already secured computing power worth $45 billion from provider Nscale, followed by a $35 billion deal with Lambda. According to reports from The Information, Anthropic has thus reached commitments for computing power of up to $517 billion within eleven months – a sum that the company itself has not officially confirmed. Anthropic also negotiated with Meta over a potential ten-billion-dollar deal for computing capacity in the summer, without either side confirming a conclusion. The series of agreements falls into a phase where Anthropic is reportedly preparing for an IPO while simultaneously entering into billion-dollar commitments that are intended to secure future revenues but also increase the default risk of individual cloud partners.
It will be crucial whether Anthropic actually calls upon the full capacity from the Akamai contract before the first payments are due in 2027, or whether the demand for CPU-related workloads grows faster than the currently focused GPU clusters. Notably, there is a pattern: Anthropic is increasingly compensating infrastructure partners not only in cash but also granting them warrants, as with Akamai – a signal that cloud providers want to participate as co-investors in Anthropic’s growth rather than just acting as service providers.
