Anthropic Commits $11.6 Billion to Akamai Cloud in Seven-Year Deal, Takes Warrant for 5% Stake

Anthropic will pay Akamai Technologies at least $11.6 billion over seven years for cloud infrastructure and managed services, the companies announced Thursday, in a deal that also hands the AI lab a warrant convertible into roughly 5% of Akamai's stock. Akamai shares jumped more than 20% in after-hours trading.

The agreement, announced after the closing bell, commits Anthropic to $11.6 billion of dedicated cloud computing capacity and managed support services over seven years, with room to expand — a total potential value of about $20 billion, the company said.

A CPU deal, not a GPU deal

The fine print matters more than the headline number. The commitment will support Anthropic's ‘accelerating CPU workload demands’ by leveraging Akamai Cloud's distributed AI infrastructure and software — inference and agentic workloads running across its global network, not the GPU training clusters that have defined the AI capex boom. It is a crack in the GPU-everything narrative: one of the world's leading AI labs is buying CPU-based cloud at historic scale, with Akamai pitching power efficiency and a global footprint as its edge over centralized GPU campuses.

The 5% warrant: a customer becoming a shareholder

The more unusual piece of deal engineering is the equity. Anthropic receives a warrant for 387,051 shares of non-voting Series B preferred stock, convertible into about 7.7 million common shares — roughly 5% of Akamai outstanding — at an implied $111.33 a share. About 2% vests with Anthropic's first payment under one of the new project plans, and the rest vests in three equal parts as Anthropic commits more spend: ‘Each additional $3 billion purchase of cloud services, at mutually agreed upon terms, will result in the vesting of approximately 1% of Akamai's common stock outstanding.’ A compute customer becoming a meaningful shareholder — with the equity gated by actual payments.

Back-loaded math: $5.5 billion of capex, no 2026 revenue

The money arrives late and lumpy. Akamai expects about $5.5 billion in capital expenditures tied to the commitment, while anticipating ‘no impact to the company's 2026 revenue guidance’ — even as it raises 2026 capex by about $1.7 billion to secure and pre-purchase critical supply-chain components. The chain is already moving: Akamai signed a hardware, software and services agreement with Lenovo and authorized server builder Jabil to procure about $1.7 billion of memory components that Akamai will hold in consignment.

The risk design

The contract is engineered for optionality on both sides. Payments are conditioned on delivery and service-availability requirements, and Anthropic can terminate the broader agreement if Akamai commits a material breach that goes unremedied or if a direct competitor of Anthropic takes control of Akamai; a material outage can end an affected project plan. A seven-year marriage with an unusually explicit list of exit clauses — the shape of a deal where the buyer knows it may be the only customer of this size.

The market reaction

Investors repriced Akamai instantly. The stock had closed the regular session down 6.8% at $110.40, then rose 16.8% to $128.99 in after-hours trading as of 4:34 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, with later prints topping 20% as the warrant and capex details circulated. The warrant's $111.33 conversion price sits just above the pre-announcement close: Anthropic's equity kicker starts essentially at the money.

Why it matters beyond Akamai

The deal landed the same week Oracle cited force majeure on its $18 billion New Mexico data center — a reminder of the concentration risk hanging over AI infrastructure buildouts. Anthropic, fielding enormous compute demand of its own, is diversifying its suppliers while locking in long-dated capacity. For Akamai — long known as a content-delivery network — the contract is a company-defining pivot: a commitment worth more than twice its annual revenue, from a single customer, betting that AI inference runs on distributed CPU clouds rather than centralized GPU farms.

What to watch: the 8-K itself, which will carry the full agreement texts and the definitive warrant terms; how quickly the $20 billion expansion option gets exercised; and whether other AI labs start demanding — or offering — customer-equity structures of their own.