Anthropic signs a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud deal with Akamai, a bet on CPUs
Akamai announced on September 24 that Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on its cloud, the largest contract in Akamai’s history. Akamai also issued Anthropic a warrant, and the deal could grow to about $20 billion.
Akamai announced on September 24 that Anthropic has committed $11.6 billion over seven years to its cloud infrastructure, more than six times the $1.8 billion deal the two reportedly struck in May.
The facts
- A CPU bet: per TechCrunch, the deal centers on CPUs. Demand for general-purpose chips has grown as AI agents take on work like running code and browsing the web. Akamai didn’t say what Anthropic will use them for.
- Conditions: Akamai’s securities filing says the commitment depends on Akamai meeting delivery and service-availability requirements.
- Revenue timing: no revenue this year. Akamai expects $150–300 million in 2027, starting in the second half, reaching an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. It plans to spend about $5.5 billion on capacity.
- A reverse warrant: Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for up to about 5% of its stock at $111.33 a share. Each additional $3 billion of spending unlocks roughly another 1%, so the deal could grow by up to $9 billion, to about $20 billion.
Our take
The structure is the interesting part. Usually chipmakers and cloud providers invest in the AI labs that buy from them; here the supplier hands the customer a stake instead. AMD used a similar arrangement with OpenAI last year.
For developers, the takeaway is that agent workloads don’t only burn GPUs. Sandboxes, code execution and web fetching all run on CPUs, and that part of cost and capacity planning is easy to underestimate.