Akamai Lands $11.6 Billion Anthropic Compute Deal, Hands Lab Warrant for Up to 5% of Its Shares

Akamai, best known as the content delivery company from the early web, has signed the largest contract in its 28-year history. On Thursday it said Anthropic had committed $11.6 billion over seven years to run CPU workloads on Akamai Cloud. As part of the deal, Akamai handed the Claude maker a warrant that could turn into roughly 5% of the company. Investors liked it. Shares that had closed the regular session at $110.41 rose between 16% and 22% in after-hours trading, according to Benzinga and Reuters.

The agreement also includes an option for Anthropic to commit up to $9 billion more. That would bring the total potential value to about $20 billion, or $20.6 billion if every expansion tranche is used. The deal is entirely CPU-based. Akamai will supply compute from its distributed network, which spans thousands of points of presence, rather than from one giant GPU training cluster.

"Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai's capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale," said Dr. Tom Leighton, Akamai's co-founder and CEO, in the company's announcement. He added that Akamai's global footprint and enterprise experience position it "to be the infrastructure provider for secure and responsible AI applications and workloads."

The Warrant and the Money

The equity piece is the unusual part. Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for non-voting convertible Series B preferred stock. On an as-converted basis it covers 7.7 million common shares at an exercise price of $111.33, almost exactly where the stock closed on announcement day. About 2%, or roughly 3.1 million share equivalents, is expected to vest with the initial $11.6 billion commitment. The remaining 3% vests only as Anthropic spends more, with about 1% unlocking for each additional $3 billion of cloud services bought within the warrant's seven-year term. Exercising the full warrant would cost Anthropic about $857 million in cash.

On the investor call, Leighton played down how much Akamai is giving away. He put the warrant's current value at "slightly over $150 million" and called that "very small" next to the size of the contract. He described the warrant as a way to align incentives for future growth.

The revenue will take time to show up. Chief Financial Officer Ed McGowan said the contract adds nothing to revenue in 2026. Revenue starts in the second half of 2027 at an estimated $150 million to $300 million for that year, then ramps to an annualized run rate of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. The contract is take-or-pay, so once capacity is delivered, revenue should hold steady for the rest of the term.

Akamai has to spend the money up front. It estimates about $5.5 billion in capital expenditures for the initial commitment: roughly $1.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2026 to pre-purchase critical components, including memory, then about $3.1 billion in 2027 and about $700 million in 2028. To fund it, McGowan pointed to the company's $4.6 billion cash balance, a $1 billion revolving credit line and cash from operations. He said management would consider raising more capital if needed.

Why It Matters

This deal is bigger than anything else in Akamai's cloud business. Earlier this year the company announced about $2.8 billion in multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services commitments, and that segment brought in $99 million in the second quarter, up 39% year over year. One customer has now committed more than four times that earlier total. It brings Akamai's signed contract value for 2026 to about $14.4 billion, which McGowan expects to produce roughly $2.2 billion in annual recurring revenue once fully ramped. For comparison, Akamai's entire second-quarter revenue was about $1.1 billion.

The deal also suggests where AI compute demand is heading. Most of the spending headlines have been about GPUs for training. This contract is about CPUs, which handle much of the work when AI agents call tools, fetch data, run code and coordinate subtasks. On the call, Leighton listed customer service voice agents, translation, speech recognition and real-time video transcoding among the use cases. The two companies already had a relationship. In May, Akamai disclosed a $1.8 billion, seven-year commitment from an unnamed frontier model company, which Bloomberg later identified as Anthropic. Within a few months, that commitment has grown several times over.

For Anthropic, Akamai is one more supplier in a series of capacity deals this year. In July it signed a 20-year lease for about 401 megawatts at a TeraWulf campus in Kentucky, and in June it agreed a memory and storage supply deal with Micron. Jacob Bourne, an analyst at eMarketer, said Anthropic taking a potential stake in Akamai "can be seen as a vote of confidence in the durability of AI-driven cloud demand." Leighton said the agreement does not stop Akamai from working with other AI companies, including the hyperscalers, which he said are already customers.

What to Watch

The main risk is execution. Akamai is committing billions to hardware before any revenue arrives, and it still has to secure memory, sign colocation capacity and bring sites online. McGowan said new sites typically take 60 to 90 days to reach full revenue potential, which could weigh on margins during the buildout. He said most of the deployment will be in the United States. Watch whether Anthropic uses any of the $9 billion expansion option, since each $3 billion tranche would both confirm demand and vest more of the warrant. And watch whether other frontier labs follow Anthropic to distributed providers like Akamai, or whether this deal stays a one-off.