Anthropic Commits $11.6B to Akamai in a Bet on CPUs

Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai's cloud infrastructure — more than six times the $1.8 billion deal reported in May.

Akamai announced the agreement Thursday. It is the largest deal in the company's history, and it continues Anthropic's run of compute commitments. The commitment is not ironclad: according to Akamai's securities filing, it depends on Akamai meeting certain delivery and service-availability requirements, and either company can end the agreement under certain conditions.

The unusual part is CPUs

This is a bet on a less-hyped corner of AI infrastructure. Demand for CPUs — the general-purpose chips that handle work like running code and browsing the web — has grown as AI agents take on more tasks. Akamai did not say what Anthropic will use them for.

That silence is the interesting detail for anyone building agents. A seven-year, eleven-figure CPU commitment is a wager that the expensive part of agentic workloads is not only model inference.

The money arrives slowly

Akamai books no 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, reaching an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.

Building that capacity costs Akamai roughly $5.5 billion. The company is also adding about $1.7 billion to this year's capital spending to buy components such as memory in advance. Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The warrant runs backwards

Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant — the right to buy shares at a set price — for nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, or up to about 5% of Akamai's outstanding stock, at $111.33 a share. About 2% is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment. The rest is tied to Anthropic spending more: each additional $3 billion it commits unlocks roughly another 1%, so the deal could grow by as much as $9 billion, to about $20 billion in total.

It is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal, and it inverts the usual shape of circular AI financing. Normally the supplier invests in the lab that buys its products. Here the supplier hands its customer a potential stake that grows with spending. AMD used a similar structure with OpenAI last year, tying warrants to chip-purchase milestones.

Anthropic is no stranger to these arrangements. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and AMD have all invested or agreed to invest in the company while selling it chips or cloud capacity. CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times last December that Anthropic does not participate in these deals at the "same scale as some other players."

What to watch

Two markers will show whether this is real. The first is Akamai's second-half 2027 revenue against that $150 million to $300 million guidance, since nothing before then tests the contract. The second is whether Anthropic commits the next $3 billion tranche, since the warrant schedule makes each escalation visible from the outside.