Akamai Signs $11.6 Billion Anthropic Deal, the Largest Contract in Its History

Akamai Technologies said Thursday it has signed a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud-computing agreement with Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, calling it the largest contract in the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company's 28-year history. The announcement, made public in a company statement and a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, sent Akamai shares as much as 22 percent higher in after-hours trading before gains settled to a smaller but still substantial advance in the sessions that followed.

The deal deepens a relationship that began quietly: Bloomberg had reported a roughly $1.8 billion Akamai-Anthropic cloud commitment in May. The new agreement is more than six times that size and carries an option, at Anthropic's discretion, to expand purchases by a further $9 billion, which would put the total potential value of the relationship at close to $20 billion over the contract's term.

The Terms of the Deal

According to the exhibit Akamai filed with the SEC, Anthropic has committed to purchase $11.6 billion of cloud services from Akamai over seven years to support what the company described as Anthropic's rapidly growing demand for central-processing-unit, or CPU, capacity. That distinguishes the contract from most other headline AI infrastructure deals, which have centered on graphics processing units, the chips that perform the dense matrix math of running a model. Akamai's capacity is intended instead for the orchestration work behind AI agents — the tool calls, data retrieval, formatting and other steps that surround a model's actual inference and that Akamai argues are better suited to distributed CPU infrastructure at the network edge than to centralized GPU clusters.

Akamai said it expects to spend roughly $5.5 billion in capital expenditures to build out the committed capacity, and it raised its 2026 capital-spending outlook by about $1.7 billion to secure hardware components. As part of the agreement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant to purchase non-voting, convertible preferred stock equivalent to as much as 7.7 million shares of Akamai common stock — about 5 percent of shares outstanding — at an exercise price of $111.33 per share. Roughly 2 percent of that stake vests immediately alongside the initial commitment, with further tranches of about 1 percent unlocking for every additional $3 billion in services Anthropic purchases, up to the full 5 percent if the relationship expands to its maximum scope. Akamai said the commitment is contingent on the company meeting delivery and service-availability requirements, and that either party can end the arrangement under specified conditions.

From Content Delivery to AI Infrastructure

Akamai was founded in 1998 by MIT researchers, including current chief executive Tom Leighton, to speed up and secure web traffic, and it built its business as a content delivery network serving many of the world's largest media and e-commerce companies. Over the past several years the company has pushed into cloud computing and security through a unit it calls Cloud Infrastructure Services, positioning its already-distributed network of edge servers as an alternative to the centralized data centers run by hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, and by AI-focused "neoclouds" such as CoreWeave.

That pivot had shown only modest results until this year. Analysts at KeyBanc, tracking the buildout, said the capacity Akamai had committed to AI inference customers grew from between 2 and 5 megawatts as recently as October 2025 to between 95 and 105 megawatts now — a jump that reflects both the Anthropic relationship and broader demand from AI companies for infrastructure outside the traditional hyperscale providers. Akamai said it does not expect the new commitment to change its 2026 revenue guidance, since the added spending is aimed at building capacity for services that begin later.

The agreement also fits into a much larger pattern of compute-buying by Anthropic itself. The company has said it is committing more than $100 billion over roughly a decade to an expanded compute partnership with Amazon built around Amazon's custom Trainium chips, and it separately arranged access to as many as a million of Google's tensor processing units in a deal reported to be worth tens of billions of dollars. Anthropic has said it wants to avoid depending on any single supplier, spreading training and inference work across Amazon's, Google's and Nvidia's hardware. The Akamai contract extends that multi-vendor strategy into a different layer of the stack: distributed, CPU-based capacity for the agentic work that surrounds, but is not itself, the core model computation running on those larger chip clusters.

"Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai's capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale," said Tom Leighton, Akamai's co-founder and chief executive.

Wall Street's Verdict

The market reaction was immediate, and largely favorable, though not uniformly so. Several firms raised price targets within a day of the announcement. Piper Sandler, reaffirming its Overweight rating, lifted its target on Akamai to $158 from $125, arguing the deal's scale "drastically changes the financial profile" of the company and could shift it from being viewed as a steady, low-growth "value" asset toward a "hypergrowth" one; the firm estimated the $11.6 billion commitment implies roughly $1.66 billion in annual recurring revenue at full run rate — about four times the size of Akamai's entire Cloud Infrastructure Services business as of the end of the second quarter. Bank of America raised its target to $185 from $175 while maintaining a Buy rating, and Evercore ISI reiterated an Outperform rating with a $175 target.

JPMorgan was more cautious. The firm raised its price target to $167 from $158 but kept a Neutral rating, citing a desire for more diversified sources of demand now that Anthropic accounts for the large majority of the new business Akamai has booked so far in 2026. The concern echoes a broader debate on Wall Street this year about whether AI infrastructure providers are becoming overly dependent on a handful of well-funded AI labs whose own revenue models remain unproven at this scale.

What Happens Next

Akamai has not disclosed a precise start date for the new capacity, though early reporting on the deal's structure has pointed to initial services beginning in the second half of 2027, with revenue ramping toward an annualized run rate near $1.7 billion by the end of 2028 if the relationship proceeds as outlined. Between now and then, Akamai faces the task of actually building the promised capacity on the accelerated capital-spending timeline it just announced, while continuing to court other AI customers to blunt concerns about relying so heavily on one counterparty. Anthropic, for its part, gains a large block of guaranteed compute capacity to support Claude's expansion into more autonomous, agentic uses — the kind of workloads that generate exactly the CPU-heavy orchestration demand the deal is built around — along with a financial stake in Akamai's success that grows only if it keeps buying more.

Shares of other infrastructure companies with exposure to AI compute, including CoreWeave and Cloudflare, ticked higher in the deal's immediate aftermath as investors weighed whether it signaled fresh demand across the sector. Akamai's employees and its long list of enterprise customers in media, retail and financial services are watching a company once defined by content delivery reorient a growing share of its investment around a single AI customer. Whether Akamai exercises the option to grow the contract toward its full $20 billion potential — and whether Anthropic's own growth continues to justify commitments of this size — will likely shape how the deal is remembered a year from now.