Anthropic just signed an $11.6 billion deal with Akamai – and it could end up owning 5% of the company

Anthropic’s hunt for computing power has found an unexpected partner. Akamai, best known for the network that speeds up websites and streaming, has signed an $11.6 billion, seven-year deal to supply Anthropic with computing capacity, SiliconANGLE reports. As part of it, Anthropic gets the right to buy up to 5% of Akamai itself. Akamai’s shares jumped more than 20% after hours.

What’s in the deal

• $11.6 billion over seven years for capacity on Akamai Cloud, aimed at what Akamai calls Anthropic’s “accelerating CPU workload demands.”
• Room to grow to about $20 billion. Anthropic can expand the commitment by up to another $9 billion within the seven years.
• A stake in Akamai. Anthropic gets a warrant for non-voting preferred shares worth up to about 5% of Akamai’s stock, at $111.33 a share. Around 2% vests with the current commitment, and roughly another 1% for every extra $3 billion Anthropic spends.
• Big spending for Akamai. It expects about $5.5 billion of capital spending tied to the deal, and has raised this year’s capex forecast by $1.7 billion to buy components early. Its 2026 revenue forecast is unchanged.

The figures come from Akamai’s announcement; we couldn’t find a separate statement from Anthropic. Akamai CEO Tom Leighton was upbeat:

Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale.

Tom Leighton, Akamai co-founder and CEO

Why CPUs, not just GPUs?

Most AI headlines are about GPUs, the chips that train and run models like Claude. But this deal is specifically about CPUs, the general-purpose processors that handle the everyday computing around those models. As AI shifts from answering questions to running agents that browse the web, run code and use tools, that kind of work grows too.

Akamai’s pitch is its network. It says its cloud offers “a continuum of compute from core to edge, with a vastly distributed network spanning thousands of points of presence,” meaning computing close to users around the world rather than in a few giant data centres.

A huge bet for Akamai

For Akamai, this is enormous. The deal averages about $1.66 billion a year. Its cloud infrastructure business made $99 million in the second quarter, up 39% on a year earlier, Forkast notes. That’s roughly $400 million a year, so Anthropic alone would be worth around four times that business’s current size.

It isn’t the pair’s first deal either. Anthropic made an earlier $1.8 billion commitment to Akamai that came to light in May, according to SiliconANGLE.

Anthropic keeps spreading its bets

The deal is the latest in a string of compute agreements as Anthropic tries to keep up with demand for Claude. Beyond its big cloud partners, it has signed a 401-megawatt data centre lease with TeraWulf worth $19 billion in contracted value, and supply deals with memory maker Micron, per SiliconANGLE.

The equity is a newer twist. By handing Anthropic a slice of itself, Akamai ties its fortunes to Anthropic’s growth: the more Anthropic spends, the more of Akamai it owns.

Why it matters

AI demand is now big enough to remake companies that were never AI companies: a 28-year-old content delivery network has just become a major AI cloud supplier. For Anthropic, it adds another supplier outside the big clouds, and it shows how much computing it expects to need for agents, not just chatbots.

Sources: SiliconANGLE, Akamai, Forkast, Investing.com