Akamai signs $11.6 billion cloud deal with Anthropic

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, has signed up for $11.6 billion of cloud capacity from Akamai Technologies over seven years, a deal that turns a company best known for content delivery into a serious AI infrastructure supplier.

Akamai announced the agreement on 24 September in the US. It says Anthropic will use Akamai Cloud's distributed infrastructure and software to support rapidly growing CPU workloads, as opposed to the GPU clusters that usually dominate AI headlines.

A warrant tied to growth

The unusual part is the equity kicker. Akamai has issued Anthropic a warrant to buy non-voting convertible Series B preferred stock equal to 7.7 million shares of common stock on an as-converted basis, or up to roughly 5% of Akamai's outstanding shares, at an exercise price of $111.33 per share.

About 2% is expected to vest with the $11.6 billion commitment announced now. The remaining 3% vests only if the relationship grows by up to another $9 billion within the seven-year term. Each additional $3 billion of cloud purchases, on terms both sides agree, would vest about 1%. If it all happens, the total commitment would reach about $20 billion.

In effect, the more Anthropic spends, the bigger its potential stake in its supplier. Similar structures have appeared in other large AI supply deals, as providers compete for a small number of very large buyers.

The cost of saying yes

Serving that demand is expensive. Akamai estimates total capital spending linked to the $11.6 billion commitment at about $5.5 billion. It expects to raise 2026 capital expenditure by roughly $1.7 billion to secure and pre-purchase critical supply chain components, including memory, and says the deal has no impact on its 2026 revenue guidance.

The contract adds to more than $2.8 billion of multi-year cloud infrastructure commitments Akamai had already announced this year across its customer base.

Akamai CEO Dr Tom Leighton said the company was "thrilled" that Anthropic chose Akamai to build and operate AI infrastructure at scale. He pointed to Akamai's expanding global footprint and experience with large enterprises as the reasons it can be "the infrastructure provider for secure and responsible AI applications and workloads."

Why CPUs, and why it matters beyond the US

The CPU focus is worth noticing. Training frontier models needs GPUs, but running AI agents at scale also generates a huge volume of ordinary computing, from orchestration and tool calls to data handling and web requests. Akamai's network, spread across thousands of points of presence, is built for that kind of distributed work close to users.

For Indian readers, the deal is a reminder of how concentrated AI spending is becoming. Akamai has not said where the Anthropic capacity will be located, or whether any of it will sit in Indian facilities. Indian companies building on Claude through its API will not see any direct change, but the capacity is meant to keep up with the demand they are part of.

The bigger signal is that AI compute demand is spreading well beyond the three large US cloud providers. Anthropic has been signing capacity deals with multiple suppliers, and Akamai now joins that list with one of the largest contracts in its history.