Anthropic's $11.6 Billion Bet on Akamai — and on CPUs, Not GPUs

Anthropic has committed to spending $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai's cloud infrastructure, Akamai said Thursday — more than six times the $1.8 billion deal the two companies were reported to be discussing in May, according to TechCrunch. It's the largest contract in Akamai's history, and it marks a notable wager on a less-hyped corner of AI infrastructure: CPUs.

General-purpose chips that handle work like running code and browsing the web have seen demand grow as AI agents take on more tasks, according to reporting cited by TechCrunch. Akamai didn't say exactly what Anthropic will use the capacity for.

Money now, revenue later

The commitment isn't ironclad: Akamai's securities filing says it depends on the company meeting delivery and service-availability requirements, and either side can end the agreement under certain conditions. Akamai expects no revenue from the deal this year. Executives told investors on a call Thursday that they expect $150 million to $300 million in 2027, starting in the second half, rising to an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.

To build the capacity, Akamai expects to spend roughly $5.5 billion — and it's adding about $1.7 billion to this year's capital spending to buy components such as memory in advance.

The warrant that flips the script

The deal's most unusual feature is a warrant: Akamai issued Anthropic the right to buy nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares — up to about 5% of Akamai's outstanding stock — at $111.33 a share. About 2% is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment; each additional $3 billion it commits unlocks roughly another 1%. The arrangement could grow the total deal to about $20 billion.

It's the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal, according to Bloomberg. And it reverses the usual pattern in so-called circular AI deals, where suppliers — chipmakers and cloud providers — invest in the AI labs that buy their products. Here, the supplier is giving its customer a potential stake that grows with the customer's spending. AMD used a similar structure with OpenAI last year, tying warrants to chip-purchase milestones.

Anthropic's spending streak

Anthropic has become a veteran of these cross-linked arrangements: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD have all invested in the company while selling it chips or cloud capacity. CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times last December that Anthropic doesn't participate in such deals at "the same scale as some other players" — though this one suggests the scale keeps rising.

Investors liked the announcement: Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Written by the BidAsk Newsroom. Based on reporting from the sources below.