Anthropic to spend $11.6B on Akamai's cloud — and get a stake in return

Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai's cloud infrastructure, Akamai said Thursday. That's more than six times the $1.8 billion deal Bloomberg reported between the two companies in May. The commitment isn't ironclad: per Akamai's securities filing, it depends on the company meeting delivery and service-availability requirements, and either side can terminate under certain conditions.

It's the largest deal in Akamai's history and the latest chapter in Anthropic's compute-gobbling streak. The bet lands on a less-hyped corner of AI infrastructure: CPUs, the general-purpose chips that handle jobs like running code and browsing the web. Demand for them has grown as AI agents take on more tasks — though Akamai didn't say what Anthropic will use them for.

The money comes later

Akamai won't book revenue from the deal this year. On a Thursday investor call, executives said they expect $150 million to $300 million in 2027, starting in the second half, ramping to an annual pace of roughly $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. To build the capacity, Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion, and it's adding roughly $1.7 billion to this year's capital spending to buy components like memory in advance.

An unusual structure

As part of the deal, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant — the right to buy shares at a set price. It covers nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, or up to about 5% of the company, at $111.33 apiece. Roughly 2% is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment; the rest is tied to further spending, with each additional $3 billion in commitments unlocking about another 1%. That could grow the deal by as much as $9 billion, to about $20 billion in all.

It's the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal. The arrangement flips the usual pattern in circular AI deals, where suppliers — chipmakers and cloud providers — invest directly in the AI labs buying their products. Here the supplier instead hands its customer a stake that grows with its spending. AMD used a similar structure with OpenAI last year, tying warrants to chip-purchase milestones.

Anthropic is no stranger to such deals: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD have all invested or agreed to invest while selling it chips or cloud capacity. CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times in December that Anthropic doesn't participate at the "same scale as some other players."

Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading Thursday.

Source: TechCrunch