Anthropic inks $11.6 billion, seven-year compute pact with Akamai

What's in the deal

Anthropic signed on for a seven-year, $11.6 billion commitment to buy computing services from Akamai, with service slated to begin during next year's back half. Akamai will provide access to central processing units, the general-purpose chips increasingly used in data centers to support AI workloads.

As part of the arrangement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant to purchase Series B shares at $111.33 each that convert into 7.7 million common shares. A portion equal to roughly 2% of Akamai's outstanding common stock will vest when the computing agreement begins, with the balance vesting over the full seven-year term.

Why Akamai is going big

Akamai said this is the largest contract it has ever signed, and it expects capital spending tied specifically to the Anthropic agreement to reach roughly $5.5 billion, topping its entire 2025 spend by more than sixfold. Most of that outlay will land next year and will mostly fund physical gear, including servers, networking equipment and chips.

The company's core revenue still comes from content delivery and cybersecurity, but it has been leaning hard into cloud computing. "Growing obviously extremely fast," is how CEO Tom Leighton described Akamai's cloud business, adding that cloud contract revenue could overtake its other segments "fairly soon." "We're not looking necessarily at a long time frame for that to happen."

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Stock pop, revenue outlook and the first-of-its-kind warrant

Investors cheered as Akamai's stock spiked up to 16%, hitting $128.46 at one point, its largest intraday rise since May 8. The company expects revenue from the Anthropic relationship to total $150 million to $300 million in the year ahead.

Leighton noted Akamai has never before attached a warrant like this to a cloud customer deal. "It's a serious step, but I think in this case it made sense to do," he said. "It helps bring the companies together." He called it a "big step up in capex," said the returns look attractive, and added Akamai is talking about additional work with "all the major players," including hyperscalers and large enterprises.

The bigger AI picture and what to watch from here

Anthropic's Claude models have been pulling in new users to speed up coding and other tasks, and the company has been racing to secure compute to keep up. Alongside Akamai, it has tapped providers including Alphabet's Google and Elon Musk's SpaceX to secure access to chips. This new contract extends the $1.8 billion agreement the two companies reached earlier this year.

Not everyone loves how intertwined AI deals have become. Some on Wall Street are uneasy with circular setups where cloud, hardware and AI firms buy from and invest in one another, since that can blur how much end demand is really there. For your wallet, the signal is pretty clear: AI infrastructure spending is accelerating, and companies supplying the plumbing - compute, networking and security - are vying for long, chunky contracts that could reshape their revenue mix over the next few years.

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