Anthropic to Pay Akamai $11.6 Billion in Seven-Year Cloud Deal
Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai's cloud infrastructure, the largest contract in Akamai's history and more than six times a previously reported $1.8 billion agreement between the two companies.
The commitment is not unconditional. 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.
Akamai will not record revenue from the contract this year. On an investor call Thursday, executives said they expect $150 million to $300 million in 2027, starting in the second half, with revenue reaching an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. To build the capacity, Akamai expects to spend roughly $5.5 billion, and it is adding about $1.7 billion to this year's capital spending to buy components such as memory in advance.
Under the agreement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant 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 under the deal. The remainder is tied to further spending: each additional $3 billion Anthropic commits to Akamai's cloud services 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, Bloomberg reported.
The arrangement is also a bet on CPUs, the general-purpose chips that handle work such as running code and browsing the web. Demand for those chips has grown as AI agents take on more tasks, though Akamai did not say what Anthropic will use them for.
The warrant reverses the more common pattern in circular AI deals, in which suppliers such as chipmakers and cloud providers invest directly in the AI labs that buy their products. Here the supplier instead gives its customer a potential stake, one that grows as Anthropic's spending with Akamai does. AMD used a similar structure with OpenAI last year, tying warrants to chip-purchase milestones.
Anthropic is familiar with such 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."
Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported.