Anthropic Commits $11.6 Billion to Akamai Cloud in Massive Seven-Year Deal
Anthropic commits to spending $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai's cloud infrastructure, marking the largest deal in Akamai's history. The agreement, announced Thursday, is more than six times larger than a $1.8 billion deal the two companies reportedly reached in May. The commitment depends on Akamai meeting certain delivery and service-availability requirements, and either company can end the agreement under certain conditions.
The deal highlights growing demand for CPUs, general-purpose chips that AI agents increasingly rely on as they handle more tasks, though Akamai doesn't say what Anthropic will use them for. Akamai expects no revenue from the deal this year, but projects $150 million to $300 million in 2027 and an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. To build out capacity, Akamai plans to spend roughly $5.5 billion and is adding $1.7 billion to this year's capital spending for components like memory.
As part of the agreement, Akamai issues Anthropic a warrant to buy up to about 5% of the company's outstanding stock at $111.33 a share, with roughly 2% vesting after Anthropic's first payment. Each additional $3 billion in spending unlocks another 1%, potentially growing the deal to about $20 billion. The structure flips the usual pattern of circular AI deals, in which suppliers invest in the AI labs that buy their products, similar to AMD's arrangement with OpenAI last year.