Akamai Announces US$11.6 Billion Multi-year Agreement With Anthropic To Support Growing Demand
Anthropic to leverage Akamai Cloud’s distributed infrastructure and software to support CPU workload growth at scale
By Ron Chen, Bureau Chief, Asia
Akamai Technologies, Inc., has announced a significantly expanded relationship with Anthropic for US$11.6 billion of contractual commitment over seven years. The multi-year commitment will support Anthropic’s accelerating CPU workload demands by leveraging Akamai Cloud’s distributed AI infrastructure and software.
The deal adds to the more than US$2.8 billion in multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) commitments across Akamai’s customer base previously announced this year. These agreements underscore a growing demand for Akamai to enable customers to build, deploy and operate AI workloads at scale.
As part of the increased strategic alignment between Akamai and Anthropic, Akamai has issued a warrant to Anthropic for the purchase of non-voting convertible Series B Preferred Stock representing 7.7 million shares of Akamai’s common stock on an as-converted basis, or up to approximately 5 per cent of Akamai’s common stock outstanding, at an exercise price of US$111.33 per share of common stock. A portion of the warrant representing approximately 2 per cent of Akamai’s common stock outstanding is expected to vest in connection with today’s announced US$11.6 billion commitment. The remaining approximately 3 per cent would vest throughout the successful expansion of the commitment up to an additional US$9 billion within the seven-year term of the warrant. Each additional US$3 billion purchase of cloud services, at mutually agreed upon terms, will result in the vesting of approximately 1 per cent of Akamai’s common stock outstanding.
“Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale,” said co-founder and CEO, Akamai Dr. Tom Leighton. “Akamai has an unparalleled reputation for helping our customers achieve their business-critical goals and build the future. Our expanding global footprint, combined with our years of experience serving the world’s largest enterprises, positions us to be the infrastructure provider for secure and responsible AI applications and workloads.”
Akamai Cloud supports a continuum of compute from core to edge, with a vastly distributed network spanning thousands of points of presence. The platform is built with diversified hardware to enable customers to build and run applications and optimize how they are served to their users and agents. Akamai’s global infrastructure enables the full lifecycle of applications in the AI era, and ensures they are fast, reliable and secure.
Total capital expenditures related to today’s US$11.6 billion commitment are estimated to be approximately US$5.5 billion. Akamai anticipates no impact to the company’s 2026 revenue guidance, and an increase of approximately US$1.7 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 to secure and pre-purchase critical supply chain components, including memory.
