NCCapital

Akamai Technologies has landed one of the largest contracts in its history, signing a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud infrastructure agreement with Anthropic as the artificial intelligence company continues an aggressive expansion of the computing capacity behind its models. The deal sent Akamai shares sharply higher in extended trading following Thursday’s announcement.

Under the agreement, Anthropic will use Akamai Cloud’s distributed infrastructure and software to support its rapidly growing CPU workloads. Unlike the graphics processors that receive much of the attention surrounding AI training, CPUs remain critical for running a wide range of data-center and AI services at scale.

The $11.6 billion commitment could eventually become considerably larger. Akamai said the relationship includes the potential for Anthropic to purchase an additional $9 billion in cloud services during the seven-year period, which would bring the total potential value of the relationship to roughly $20 billion.

The companies are also linking their relationship through equity. Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant that could ultimately represent approximately 5% of Akamai’s outstanding common stock, giving the AI company the opportunity to become a significant shareholder in one of its infrastructure providers.

The warrant covers preferred shares convertible into approximately 7.7 million Akamai common shares, with an effective exercise price of $111.33 per common share. A portion representing roughly 2% of Akamai’s outstanding shares is tied to the initial $11.6 billion commitment, while another 3% can vest as Anthropic expands its spending.

Specifically, each additional $3 billion in cloud services purchased by Anthropic under mutually agreed terms would unlock another approximately 1% of Akamai’s outstanding shares under the warrant. The structure gives both companies a financial incentive to deepen the partnership beyond the already substantial initial contract.

The agreement represents a major validation of Akamai’s effort to expand beyond the content-delivery and cybersecurity businesses for which it has traditionally been known. The company has increasingly positioned its global infrastructure as a distributed cloud platform capable of handling AI workloads from large enterprise customers.

Akamai said the Anthropic agreement follows more than $2.8 billion in other multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services commitments announced across its customer base this year. The latest contract dramatically increases the scale of that business and gives Akamai a long-term commitment from one of the fastest-growing companies in artificial intelligence.

Supporting Anthropic will require Akamai to spend heavily itself. The company estimates approximately $5.5 billion in capital expenditures related to the initial $11.6 billion commitment, including an additional $1.7 billion of spending in 2026 to secure and pre-purchase critical components such as memory. Akamai said the agreement does not change its 2026 revenue guidance.

For Anthropic, the deal represents another step in a much larger effort to secure the enormous amounts of computing infrastructure needed to train and operate increasingly capable AI systems. The company has been signing multibillion-dollar infrastructure agreements as demand for its models and AI agents increases, turning access to computing capacity into one of its most important strategic priorities.

The partnership also illustrates how the AI infrastructure boom is expanding beyond GPUs. While Nvidia and other accelerator manufacturers remain at the center of AI investment, the enormous scale of modern AI services requires CPUs, networking, memory, storage and data-center capacity as well. Akamai is betting that its distributed infrastructure can capture a meaningful portion of that spending.

CEO and co-founder Tom Leighton described the expanded relationship as an opportunity for Akamai to become a major infrastructure provider for AI applications and workloads. For Akamai, the $11.6 billion commitment—and the possibility of eventually expanding it to roughly $20 billion—could represent a defining moment in its transformation from an internet infrastructure pioneer into a much larger AI cloud provider.