Akamai Technologies said it has signed an $11.6 billion, seven-year commitment with Anthropic for cloud infrastructure to support the AI company’s CPU workloads — the largest contract in Akamai’s history and a sharp marker of its shift from content delivery and security toward AI compute capacity.
Akamai announced the expansion of its Anthropic relationship after the U.S. market closed on September 24, 2026. Chief Financial Officer Ed McGowan said the agreement can grow by an additional $9 billion of revenue commitments, bringing the potential total to about $20 billion over seven years. Coverage from Bloomberg, SiliconANGLE, Capacity, and The Next Web matched those core figures. Bloomberg reported that Akamai will supply access to central processing units — generalist chips that have seen renewed demand in data centers supporting AI services — rather than the GPU clusters that have dominated recent AI infrastructure spending.
Serving the pact means spending first. Akamai said it expects to invest about $5.5 billion over the next two years to support the $11.6 billion commitment, including roughly $1.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2026 to secure supply-chain components such as memory, about $3.1 billion in 2027, and about $700 million in 2028. Bloomberg reported that the Anthropic-related capital plan is more than six times what Akamai spent in all of 2025. The company said it does not expect any revenue from the contract in 2026 and left its 2026 guidance unchanged. Revenue is expected to begin in the second half of 2027, at about $150 million to $300 million for the full year, and to reach an annualized run rate of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.
The commercial structure also concentrates risk and upside in one frontier customer. Akamai said it issued Anthropic a warrant to purchase up to 7.7 million common share equivalents of Series B non-voting convertible preferred stock, equal to about 5% of shares outstanding. About 2% is expected to vest with the initial commitment; Capacity reported that the remaining 3% vests as the relationship grows, with roughly 1% vesting for each additional $3 billion of cloud services purchased. The Next Web reported an exercise price of $111.33. Akamai said the warrant’s fair value is included in the $11.6 billion total and will be deducted from revenue over the contract.
The deal sits on top of earlier cloud wins. Akamai said it had already announced more than $2.8 billion in multiyear cloud infrastructure services contracts before this expansion. SiliconANGLE reported that Akamai’s May 2026 first-quarter results included a $1.8 billion, seven-year cloud commitment from an unnamed frontier-model company that Bloomberg later identified as Anthropic.
If the figures hold, Anthropic becomes both Akamai’s largest disclosed cloud customer and a material driver of near-term capital intensity. Capex starts in 2026 while contract revenue does not, and a take-or-pay CPU commitment paired with a customer warrant of up to about 5% ties Akamai’s balance sheet and equity overhang more tightly to one AI lab’s demand. After-hours trading jumped following the announcement — SiliconANGLE cited a gain of more than 20%, while Bloomberg put the move near 17% — underscoring how investors read the pact as both a capacity win and a concentration bet.
Anthropic was not quoted in the coverage reviewed for this article.