Akamai Technologies has signed a $11.6 billion, seven-year cloud contract with Anthropic to supply CPU infrastructure for the Claude maker's inference workloads, with the deal expandable to roughly $20 billion and paired with an equity warrant for up to 5% of Akamai's common stock. The companies announced the multi-year agreement on September 24, 2026, and AKAM shares jumped about 20% in after-hours trading.
A hyperscaler alternative for Anthropic's CPU workloads
Anthropic will run non-GPU serving and orchestration workloads on Akamai Cloud, tapping the CDN pioneer's Cloud Infrastructure Services and distributed edge footprint rather than adding those workloads to its existing bookings with AWS and Google Cloud. The base commitment is $11.6 billion over seven years, with $9 billion in optional expansion capacity that would push the total to about $20 billion if fully exercised.
Equity warrant tied to spend
Anthropic receives a warrant for roughly 7.7 million Akamai shares at an exercise price of $111.33, or about 5% of the company on a fully diluted basis. Roughly 2% vests with the base $11.6 billion commitment; each additional $3 billion of cloud services vests about another 1%. Akamai plans about $5.5 billion in supporting capital expenditure, with $1.7 billion incremental in 2026 for supply chain components.
Why the deal matters
The agreement puts Akamai on the frontier-AI infrastructure map alongside the hyperscalers and specialist neoclouds Anthropic already leans on. It follows a wave of multibillion-dollar AI compute pacts, including Oracle's Project Jupiter dispute and Verizon's AI Skills for America pact announced this week. Akamai CEO Tom Leighton said Anthropic is "advancing the AI revolution" and picked Akamai for "building and operating AI infrastructure at scale."
Reporting based on coverage from GlobeNewswire, Reuters and Yahoo Finance.