Anthropic to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years for cloud infrastructure

Internet infrastructure company Akamai announced Thursday that AI company Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on its cloud infrastructure. The figure is more than six times the size of a $1.8 billion deal between the two companies reported by Bloomberg in May.

According to Akamai's securities filing, the commitment is not guaranteed — it depends on Akamai meeting certain delivery and service-availability requirements, and either party can terminate the agreement under certain conditions. The deal is the largest in Akamai's history and extends Anthropic's pattern of heavy compute purchasing. It focuses on CPUs, general-purpose chips whose demand has grown as AI agents take on more tasks, though Akamai did not specify how Anthropic intends to use them.

Revenue timeline and investment

Akamai does not expect revenue from the deal this year. On a Thursday investor call, executives said they anticipate $150 million to $300 million in 2027, starting in the second half, with annual revenue reaching about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. Akamai plans to spend roughly $5.5 billion to build out capacity, plus an additional $1.7 billion in this year's capital spending to purchase components such as memory in advance.

Stock warrant

As part of the agreement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares — up to about 5% of the company — at $111.33 per share. Roughly 2% is expected to become available once Anthropic makes its first payment, with the rest tied to additional spending: each extra $3 billion committed unlocks about another 1%, meaning the deal could eventually grow to about $20 billion in total.

Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday.