In May, Bloomberg put Anthropic’s agreement with Akamai at $1.8 billion. The actual figure turns out to be more than six times higher: on Thursday, Akamai announced that Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion on its cloud infrastructure over the course of seven years.
No deal in Akamai’s history has been bigger. It is also another sign that Anthropic keeps buying compute as quickly as it can. Still, the type of chips in the contract matters more than the dollar amount.
The quiet bet on CPUs
When people write about AI infrastructure, they usually mean GPUs. This contract centers on CPUs instead. These general-purpose processors take care of jobs such as executing code and browsing the web.
As AI agents take on more tasks, demand for these chips has climbed. Akamai did not disclose how Anthropic plans to use them, so any theory about the workload is speculation.
Don’t count the $11.6 billion as guaranteed money before reading the details. Akamai’s securities filing says the commitment is conditional on Akamai meeting specific delivery and service-availability requirements. Under certain conditions, either party can terminate the agreement.
A supplier handing its customer equity
The unusual element is a warrant. Akamai has given Anthropic the right to buy shares at a fixed price. It takes the form of nonvoting preferred stock that can convert into 7.7 million common shares, at $111.33 a share. That comes to as much as about 5% of Akamai’s outstanding stock.
Roughly 2% is expected to vest, or become available to Anthropic, once Anthropic makes its first payment under the agreement. The remainder depends on Anthropic spending more. For each additional $3 billion Anthropic commits to Akamai’s cloud services, about another 1% unlocks. That means the deal could expand by up to $9 billion, for a total of around $20 billion.
According to Bloomberg, Akamai has never before attached a warrant to a cloud deal.
The arrangement also flips the familiar circular AI deal. Usually the suppliers, meaning chipmakers and cloud providers, invest directly in the AI labs that buy from them. In this case the supplier gives its customer a potential stake, and the stake gets bigger the more Anthropic spends with Akamai. There is one clear precedent. Last year AMD gave OpenAI a similar structure, with warrants tied to chip-purchase milestones.
Anthropic has done this before
Anthropic has made deals like this before. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and AMD have each invested, or agreed to invest, in the company while also selling it chips or cloud capacity.
Last December, CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times that Anthropic does not take part in these deals at the “same scale as some other players.” That claim is harder to defend next to an $11.6 billion contract that could reach $20 billion.
Akamai pays up front and waits for revenue
Akamai will not 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 of the year. By the end of 2028, they expect revenue to reach an annual pace of about $1.7 billion.
The spending starts much earlier. Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion building out the capacity. It is also adding about $1.7 billion to this year’s capital spending so it can buy components such as memory in advance.
In short, Akamai is putting billions into hardware today for revenue that won’t begin until the second half of next year, under a contract either side can exit. Investors did not seem worried. The Wall Street Journal reported that Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday.