Akamai signs $11.6bn seven-year cloud deal with Anthropic, expandable to $20bn
Akamai Technologies has signed a $11.6 billion, seven-year cloud services agreement with Anthropic to support the AI lab's growing compute demands, with an option to expand the commitment by a further $9 billion and a warrant giving Anthropic up to 5% of Akamai's stock.
Anthropic has signed an $11.6 billion cloud services agreement with Akamai Technologies, as the artificial intelligence lab seeks additional computing capacity to support its growing workloads, Reuters reported on Thursday.
Akamai announced the “significantly expanded relationship” in a company statement dated 24 September 2026, describing a $11.6 billion contractual commitment over seven years. The deal will support Anthropic’s “accelerating CPU workload demands” by leveraging Akamai Cloud’s distributed AI infrastructure and software.
The agreement could expand by an additional $9 billion, bringing the potential total commitment to about $20 billion. Akamai shares jumped 15% in extended trading on Thursday following the announcement.
As part of the strategic alignment, Akamai has issued Anthropic a warrant for the purchase of non-voting convertible Series B Preferred Stock representing 7.7 million shares of Akamai common stock on an as-converted basis — up to approximately 5% of Akamai’s outstanding common stock, at an exercise price of $111.33 per share. A portion of the warrant representing about 2% of Akamai’s stock is expected to vest in connection with the initial $11.6 billion commitment, with each additional $3 billion of cloud purchases vesting roughly a further 1%.
Akamai said total capital expenditures related to the commitment are estimated at approximately $5.5 billion, and it anticipates no impact to its 2026 revenue guidance, with about $1.7 billion of extra 2026 capex to secure supply-chain components including memory. The deal adds to more than $2.8 billion in multi-year cloud infrastructure services commitments Akamai has announced across its customer base this year.
“Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale,” said Tom Leighton, Akamai’s co-founder and CEO.
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