Akamai Signed an $11.6 Billion Cloud Deal With Anthropic and Took a Warrant for Up to 5 Percent of Its Stock

Akamai Technologies announced a seven year, 11.6 billion dollar cloud services agreement with Anthropic on Thursday, a deal structured so unusually that Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for up to roughly 5 percent of its own common stock as part of the arrangement rather than a straightforward services contract. TechCrunch's report on the agreement says the contract could expand by a further 9 billion dollars over its term, bringing the potential total commitment to around 20 billion dollars.

An equity stake instead of a simple bill

Under the terms Akamai disclosed in its own announcement, the warrant covers non-voting convertible preferred stock exercisable at 111.33 dollars a share, with roughly 2 percent vesting immediately against the initial 11.6 billion dollar commitment and further tranches, worth about 1 percent of the company for every additional 3 billion dollars Anthropic spends, vesting as the contract grows. Akamai chief executive Tom Leighton said in the company's statement that "Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai's capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale," language that frames the deal as validation of Akamai's pivot from its original content delivery network business toward AI infrastructure.

What it costs Akamai to deliver

The company said the agreement will not affect its 2026 revenue guidance but will add roughly 1.7 billion dollars to this year's capital spending as it secures supply chain components, including memory, ahead of the buildout Anthropic's workload will require, with total capital expenditure tied to the deal expected to run around 5.5 billion dollars. Akamai's shares jumped as much as 15 percent in extended trading once the deal was announced, a reaction that reflects how directly investors are now pricing distributed infrastructure providers on their ability to land exactly this kind of long dated AI compute commitment.

Anthropic's compute shopping spree continues

The Akamai agreement is the latest in a string of infrastructure deals Anthropic has struck this year as it works to secure enough compute capacity to keep pace with rivals including OpenAI, each contract adding to a growing pile of multi year, multi billion dollar commitments that collectively dwarf the company's current revenue. For Akamai, a company built on caching web content rather than training AI models, the deal is as much a bet on its own reinvention as it is a straightforward sale of server capacity.