Anthropic to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years in cloud deal

Akamai says Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on its cloud—more than six times a $1.8 billion arrangement Bloomberg reported in May. The commitment depends on delivery and availability terms either side can exit under certain conditions.

Akamai expects no revenue from the deal this year, $150–300 million in 2027, and an annual pace near $1.7 billion by end of 2028, while spending about $5.5 billion to build capacity.

Anthropic also gets a warrant for nonvoting preferred convertible into up to about 5% of Akamai stock at $111.33 a share, vesting as spending rises—potentially expanding the relationship toward $20 billion.

We’re reading this as infrastructure diversification, not another GPU headline. Akamai is selling CPUs—the chips that run code and browse—as agents create demand beyond the training cluster. Anthropic did not say exactly what it will run there. The bet still matters: agent workloads need general compute, not only accelerators.

The warrant structure is the twist. Usually chipmakers and clouds invest in the labs that buy from them. Here the supplier hands the customer upside that grows with spend—closer to AMD’s milestone warrants with OpenAI than to a plain capacity contract.

Useful AI at Anthropic’s scale requires boring, reliable capacity. An $11.6 billion commitment that can grow, with exit clauses and delivery gates, is how you buy that without pretending the number is cash already spent.

The downside if circular finance keeps thickening: opacity about who owes whom, and equity-like claims that blur customer and investor. Akamai shares jumped as much as 17% after hours. Markets like the story. We want the capacity to show up on schedule.

TechCrunch’s Aditya Mehta reported September 25, 2026, citing Akamai’s securities filing and investor call. It is Akamai’s largest deal and first cloud contract with an attached warrant.