Anthropic agrees to $11.6B cloud deal with Akamai over seven years

Anthropic will pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years for cloud infrastructure, with the total commitment potentially rising to about $20 billion depending on Anthropic’s usage and spending milestones. The deal is contingent on Akamai meeting delivery and service-availability requirements, and either party can terminate under specified conditions.

Akamai will issue Anthropic a warrant for nonvoting preferred stock convertible into up to 7.7 million common shares, representing roughly 5% of Akamai’s outstanding stock at a strike price of $111.33 per share. About 2% of the warrant is expected to vest when Anthropic makes its first payment, with additional tranches unlocking approximately 1% for every additional $3 billion Anthropic commits to Akamai’s services.

The arrangement marks the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal, reversing the more common pattern where suppliers invest directly in AI labs. AMD previously used a similar structure with OpenAI in 2025, tying warrants to chip-purchase milestones.

Akamai expects no revenue from the deal in 2026, with initial revenue of $150 million to $300 million projected for 2027, ramping to an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. To support the deal, Akamai plans to spend about $5.5 billion on capacity expansion and add $1.7 billion to its 2026 capital expenditures for components such as memory.

The agreement is the largest in Akamai’s history and reflects Anthropic’s ongoing expansion of compute capacity, including prior investments or agreements with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD.