Written by Admin Alex · Fact-Checked by M.Ali · Info Verified September 2026
We review and update this article regularly as new information becomes available.
TL;DR: Anthropic signed a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud computing deal with Akamai that could grow to roughly $20 billion, and Akamai walked away with warrants for AI-linked stock on top of the contract, sending its shares up 17% after hours.
Akamai has spent most of its 27 year history known for content delivery and web security, not AI infrastructure. That changed on September 25, 2026, when the company announced a seven-year, $11.6 billion agreement to supply Anthropic with cloud computing capacity, a deal roughly six times the size of a $1.8 billion arrangement the two companies had already struck back in May.
The contract isn’t for the GPU clusters most people associate with AI training. Akamai is providing CPU-based cloud infrastructure, the kind of general-purpose computing power Anthropic needs for tasks like running code and letting Claude browse the web on a user’s behalf, work that doesn’t require the specialized chips Nvidia and AMD build for raw model training.
Akamai says it will spend roughly $5.5 billion building out the capacity this deal requires. In exchange, the company expects the arrangement to start generating between $150 million and $300 million in revenue in the second half of 2027, ramping to an annualized pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. That’s a significant new revenue stream for a company whose core business has been maturing for years.
The more unusual part of the deal is the equity attached to it. Akamai received a warrant for nonvoting preferred stock that converts into roughly 7.7 million shares of Anthropic common stock, potentially as much as 5% of the AI company’s outstanding shares, at a strike price of $111.33 per share. Only about 2% of that warrant vests once Anthropic makes its first payment, with the rest unlocking in roughly 1% increments as Anthropic’s spending crosses additional $3 billion thresholds. It’s the first time Akamai has taken equity as part of a cloud contract.
Wall Street liked what it saw. Akamai’s stock jumped 17% in after-hours trading once the deal was announced, and shares of other infrastructure players tied to the AI buildout, including CoreWeave and Cloudflare, ticked up too on the read-through that demand for computing capacity keeps expanding well past what anyone predicted a year ago.
The deal is contingent on Akamai actually hitting delivery and service-availability targets, and either side can walk away under certain conditions if that doesn’t happen. That’s a meaningful caveat given how quickly Akamai now has to build data center capacity at a scale it has never operated before.
For Anthropic, the agreement fits a pattern that’s become familiar across the AI industry in 2026: sign massive, multi-year infrastructure commitments with more than one supplier, spreading risk across chipmakers and cloud operators instead of betting everything on a single vendor. For Akamai, it’s a bet that 27 years of running distributed infrastructure at scale can translate into a business most people wouldn’t have associated with the company a year ago.
Bottom Line: This deal is as much a signal as it is a contract. When a company built on content delivery networks starts collecting AI warrants, it means the computing shortage behind the AI boom now reaches well past Nvidia’s order book, into corners of the tech industry that spent the last two decades doing something else entirely.
