Anthropic signs an $11.6 billion cloud deal with Akamai, and gets warrants to keep spending

Akamai announced Thursday that Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai's cloud infrastructure. It is the largest deal in Akamai's history and more than six times the size of the $1.8 billion compute deal the two companies signed in May, which Bloomberg reported. Per Akamai's securities filing, the commitment is not ironclad: it depends on delivery and service-availability requirements, and either company can end the agreement under certain conditions.

The revenue ramp

Even with the headline figure at $11.6 billion, Akamai will not book revenue from the deal in 2026. On an investor call, 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 out the capacity, Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion, and it is adding roughly $1.7 billion to this year's capital spending to buy components such as memory in advance. A substantial share of the contract goes to capacity Akamai has to build before the revenue starts arriving.

The equity kicker

The part of the deal that stands out is not the compute. It is the warrant. Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant, essentially the right to buy shares at a set price, for nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, or up to about 5% of the company's outstanding stock, at $111.33 a share. About 2% is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment. The rest is tied to spending: each additional $3 billion Anthropic commits to Akamai's cloud services unlocks roughly another 1%. If the deal grows by the full amount, that is up to $9 billion more, bringing the total to about $20 billion. Bloomberg reported it is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal.

The circular deal, flipped

The common pattern in these "circular" AI deals has the supplier investing in the customer: chipmakers and cloud providers take stakes in the AI labs that buy their products. The Akamai–Anthropic contract runs the other direction: the supplier hands its customer a potential stake, one that grows as Anthropic's spending grows. AMD used a similar structure with OpenAI last year, tying warrants to chip-purchase milestones. Anthropic knows both sides of the arrangement: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD have all invested in, 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."

The quieter CPU bet

The deal also points at a less-hyped corner of AI infrastructure: the CPU. Demand for general-purpose chips, the ones that run code, serve web pages and handle background work, has grown as AI agents take on more tasks, though Akamai did not say what Anthropic plans to use the capacity for. On the trading side, the Wall Street Journal reported that Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday.

What it adds up to

If you are evaluating where to run your compute, the deal is a useful reference for how the biggest contracts are being structured right now: multi-year, with explicit delivery requirements, an exit clause, and an equity kicker tied to spending. For buyers, the warrant is the part to watch. It turns a cloud contract into an ongoing relationship with a slice of the supplier attached.