The deal allows for a further $9 billion of expansion, taking the potential total commitment to around $20 billion.
As part of the agreement, Akamai has issued Anthropic a warrant for non-voting convertible Series B Preferred Stock equivalent to 7.7 million shares of common stock, or up to approximately 5% of Akamai’s common stock outstanding, at an exercise price of $111.33 per share.
Around 2% is expected to vest with the initial $11.6 billion commitment. The remaining 3% vests as the relationship grows, with roughly 1% vesting for each additional $3 billion of cloud services purchased, on mutually agreed terms, within the warrant’s seven-year term.
Akamai estimates total capital expenditure tied to the commitment at approximately $5.5 billion. It expects to spend an additional $1.7 billion in 2026 to secure and pre-purchase critical supply chain components, including memory, but said the deal would have no impact on its 2026 revenue guidance.
Dr Tom Leighton, co-founder and CEO of Akamai, said the company’s “expanding global footprint” and enterprise experience position it as “the infrastructure provider for secure and responsible AI applications and workloads”.
CPU focus
The deal is framed around CPU capacity rather than the GPU clusters that have dominated AI infrastructure spending, though Akamai has been building out GPU capacity too. In October 2025 it launched Akamai Inference Cloud to push AI inference from core data centres out to the edge of the internet, pairing NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs with its distributed cloud and an edge network of more than 4,200 locations.
The agreement builds on more than $2.8 billion in multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) commitments Akamai has announced this year. In May it disclosed a $1.8 billion, seven-year CIS commitment from an unnamed frontier model provider, and in August a four-year contract worth more than $600 million with a new US technology customer.
The deals mark Akamai’s continued shift away from its content delivery roots, which began with the launch of Akamai Connected Cloud. In the first quarter, CIS revenue rose 40% year on year to $94.6 million, while revenue from delivery and other cloud applications fell 7%, which Akamai put down to lower pricing on contract renewals.
For Anthropic, the deal adds to a growing list of compute agreements. Those include an up to 5GW agreement with Amazon, a 5GW agreement with Google and Broadcom due to start coming online in 2027, a partnership with Microsoft and NVIDIA covering $30 billion of Azure capacity, and a $50 billion US infrastructure investment with Fluidstack. In May it also agreed to take all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data centre.
The pre-purchase of memory also points to supply chain pressure across AI infrastructure builds, with Akamai moving to lock in components ahead of deployment.
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