Akamai signs $11.6B seven-year Anthropic cloud deal, grants warrant for up to 5% stake

Akamai Technologies announced on September 24 at 4:01 p.m. EDT, from its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a seven-year $11.6 billion cloud services commitment from Anthropic. The deal runs on Akamai Cloud's distributed AI infrastructure and software to support Anthropic's growing CPU workload demands. Akamai issued a warrant allowing Anthropic to purchase non-voting convertible Series B Preferred Stock representing roughly 7.7 million shares of Akamai's outstanding common stock on an as-converted basis, equivalent to approximately 5% of Akamai's outstanding common stock, at an exercise price of $111.33 per share.

Vesting of the warrant is tied to spending milestones. Approximately 2% of outstanding common stock vests with the $11.6 billion commitment announced today. The remaining approximately 3% would vest over the seven-year term if the relationship expands by up to an additional $9 billion, with each incremental $3 billion in cloud services purchases triggering approximately 1% additional vesting. The total potential commitment could reach approximately $20 billion. Akamai estimates total capital expenditures tied to the deal at approximately $5.5 billion, including an increase of approximately $1.7 billion in 2026 capital spending to secure and pre-purchase key supply chain components including memory. Akamai also authorized manufacturer Jabil to purchase approximately $1.7 billion in memory components under an existing services agreement.

Akamai shares rose up to 22% in extended trading after the announcement, and briefly hit 26%. The deal is part of Anthropic's broader 2026 compute expansion. In August Anthropic agreed to spend $45 billion to rent AI cloud capacity at Nscale's West Virginia data center campus, signed a $35 billion six-year agreement with Lambda in June, committed more than $100 billion to AWS over a decade, and was reported by Reuters to have a $30 billion relationship with Microsoft Azure and a $10 billion deal with Volta Infra for a Norway data center. Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne described the arrangement as a vote of confidence in the durability of AI-driven cloud demand.