Anthropic signs an $11.6bn cloud deal with Akamai

Anthropic agreed to pay content-delivery and cloud-infrastructure firm Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years, with an option to expand the commitment by a further $9 billion to roughly $20 billion. Akamai called it the largest commercial agreement in its history.

Unlike the GPU-training deals that have dominated 2026’s compute spending, the arrangement covers CPU (general-purpose processor) capacity, which Akamai said would support the growing demand from AI agents that run code and browse the web on users’ behalf rather than train models. Akamai estimated total capital expenditure tied to the commitment at around $5.5 billion, and said it would raise 2026 capex by about $1.7 billion to secure supply-chain components, including memory, ahead of building out the capacity.

As part of the deal, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant to buy non-voting convertible preferred stock — convertible into roughly 7.7 million common shares, or up to about 5% of Akamai’s outstanding stock, at an exercise price of $111.33 — with vesting tied to spend: about 2% vests on Anthropic’s first payment, and each additional $3 billion in commitments unlocks roughly another 1%. Akamai said the deal would not affect its 2026 revenue guidance, with recognised revenue beginning in the second half of 2027 and reaching an annualised pace of around $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.

The agreement extended a pattern from 2026 in which compute and cloud suppliers took equity stakes tied to milestones in the AI companies they served, rather than selling capacity as a straightforward purchase, aligning supplier and customer financially over the life of a multi-year contract.