Anthropic reserves Akamai capacity for $11.6B: cloud contract may grow to $20B

Anthropic, developer of the AI assistant Claude, is sharply expanding its computing infrastructure. The company committed to spend about $11.6 billion on Akamai cloud capacity and software under a seven-year agreement.

The deal may be even larger. Akamai has provided for the possibility of expanding cooperation by another $9 billion, which would increase the potential volume of commitments to about $20 billion.

At the same time, Anthropic received a warrant — the right to acquire Akamai shares on predetermined terms. If the program is fully completed, it could give the Claude developer an economic interest of up to approximately 5% of the company's shares.

Akamai lands the largest cloud contract in its history

The agreement significantly changes the scale of Akamai's cloud business, which was historically known primarily for internet content delivery infrastructure and cybersecurity.

Now the company is increasingly competing for computing workloads related to artificial intelligence.

Anthropic will use Akamai's distributed cloud infrastructure for growing CPU workloads — central processing units. This is an important detail: developing AI requires not only expensive graphics accelerators used for training and complex computations, but also a huge amount of ordinary processor capacity.

Such capacity is needed, for example, for executing code, processing requests, running software agents, searching for information, and numerous auxiliary operations around the AI models themselves.

The agreement expands the companies' existing relationship. According to documents filed by Akamai with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the new project plans were signed on September 18 under the master agreement effective since May 2026.

$11.6B is a commitment, but with conditions

The contract wording is important.

Anthropic committed to pay Akamai about $11.6 billion in aggregate under two project plans, if the provider meets the stipulated requirements for capacity provision and service availability.

Each of the plans is designed for an initial seven-year term that begins on the date the respective services are launched.

The documents also provide conditions under which the agreements may be terminated. Therefore, $11.6 billion is more correctly considered a contractual commitment over the entire period, rather than already guaranteed revenue for Akamai.

For Akamai itself, the project will require enormous investments even before it begins to generate main revenues.

Akamai will need to invest about $5.5B

The company estimates capital expenditures associated with the initial Anthropic contract at about $5.5 billion.

About $1.7 billion is planned to be spent already in 2026 — primarily on pre-purchasing critical components, including memory.

Another about $3.1 billion of investments is expected in 2027, when the main infrastructure deployment begins. Approximately $700 million more falls on 2028.

At the same time, Akamai does not expect significant revenue from the agreement in 2026.

In 2027, the company forecasts roughly $150–300 million of revenue under the contract, with services beginning to scale only in the second half of the year.

By the end of 2028, Akamai expects to reach about $1.7 billion of annual revenue from the initial agreement and then maintain that level for the remaining term.

Anthropic may obtain up to 5% of Akamai

An unusual part of the deal is a warrant that links the volume of Anthropic's purchases to its potential stake in the infrastructure provider.

Akamai issued Anthropic the right to purchase Series B convertible preferred stock. Upon conversion, it could correspond to approximately 7.7 million Akamai common shares, or about 5% of the current number.

The effective exercise price is $111.33 per common share.

Under the initial $11.6 billion contract, the vesting of rights to approximately 2% of Akamai shares is expected.

The remaining about 3% are linked to a possible expansion of the deal by another $9 billion. Each additional block of cloud services purchases of about $3 billion may unlock another approximately 1% of shares.

Thus, Anthropic gains a financial interest in the growth of the provider to which it itself may bring tens of billions of dollars in revenue.

The deal may nearly double in size

The initial $11.6 billion is not the maximum scale of the relationship between the companies.

The terms provide for the possibility of additional cloud purchases of about another $9 billion during the term of the agreement.

If the expansion is fully carried out, the total volume could approach $20 billion.

This is especially significant for Akamai against the background of the company's other cloud contracts. Prior to the Anthropic deal, it had already announced in 2026 over $2.8 billion of multi-year customer commitments for cloud infrastructure.

A single contract with the Claude developer now exceeds that amount many times over.

The market first reacted with a jump in shares

After the announcement of the deal, Akamai's shares jumped by about 22% in extended trading.

The next day, the reaction became significantly calmer: on September 25, the stock closed the regular session up about 3.2% at $113.94.

For investors, the contract at once means a huge new source of future revenue and the need to invest billions of dollars in infrastructure long before receiving the bulk of payments.

That is why the deal is important not only for its size but also its structure: Akamai is effectively financing the construction of computing capacity today in exchange for a long-term commitment by Anthropic to buy it for many years.

The AI race is increasingly becoming a race for infrastructure

For Anthropic, the agreement with Akamai is another example of how capital-intensive the development of advanced artificial intelligence models is becoming.

The company no longer only needs a successful Claude model and a growing customer base. The more users, developers and autonomous AI agents perform complex tasks, the more computing capacity must be reserved in advance.

It is especially indicative that the new deal is focused on central processors, not only the most debated graphics accelerators.

This demonstrates the next phase of the infrastructure race: AI companies need not just a limited batch of the most expensive chips, but an entire system of data centers, memory, networks, ordinary processors, specialized accelerators and software.

Akamai, in turn, gets the opportunity to turn its global distributed network into one of the major infrastructure layers for AI.

If Anthropic actually takes advantage of the possibility to expand the contract to $20 billion, the deal will become yet another confirmation that the largest spending in the new phase of the artificial intelligence race is moving away from model development and toward construction and leasing of gigantic computing infrastructure.

Based on materials from: Akamai Technologies, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Reuters.