Anthropic to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years in cloud deal
TechCrunch Aditya Mehta ● Covered by 2 sources
Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion on Akamai cloud over seven years. It’s a giant bet on CPUs, not the flashier AI chips.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Aditya Mehta — read the original for the full story.
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Anthropic is making a huge, long-term commitment to Akamai’s cloud infrastructure: $11.6 billion over seven years. Akamai disclosed the deal on Thursday, and said it is the largest in the company’s history. Bloomberg had reported a $1.8 billion agreement between the two companies back in May, so this is a much bigger number than anyone outside the room was working with then.
The deal is not locked in no matter what. Akamai said in a securities filing that the commitment depends on it meeting delivery and service-availability requirements, and either side can walk away under certain conditions. That keeps the whole thing from being a simple headline-grabbing pledge. It is big, but it still has moving parts.
What stands out most is the hardware angle. Akamai said the deal also reflects a bet on CPUs, the general-purpose chips that do the less glamorous work of running code and handling web traffic. Demand for those chips has climbed as AI agents take on more tasks, though Akamai did not say exactly what Anthropic plans to do with them. This is not the usual GPU spectacle. It is more ordinary on the surface, and maybe that is the point.
Akamai does not expect any revenue from the deal this year. On Thursday’s investor call, executives said they expect $150 million to $300 million in 2027, beginning in the second half, with revenue reaching an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. To support that, Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion building capacity, plus about $1.7 billion more in this year’s capital spending for components such as memory bought in advance.
The deal also comes with an unusual twist: Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, or up to about 5% of the company’s outstanding stock, at $111.33 a share. About 2% is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment. After that, every extra $3 billion Anthropic commits to Akamai’s cloud services unlocks roughly another 1%, which means the deal could grow by as much as $9 billion to about $20 billion total. It is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal, and it flips the more common pattern in AI, where suppliers invest in the labs buying from them. Here, the customer gets a potential stake in the supplier instead.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of deal that says the AI boom has fully learned to recycle its own money with a straight face. Akamai handing a customer equity upside while the customer promises billions of spend is elegant, weird, and very 2024-coded. The real tell is the CPUs: the industry keeps chasing the glamorous chips, but the boring ones still pay the bills.
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