Anthropic's $11.6 Billion Akamai Deal Is a Bet on CPUs

Anthropic has committed $11.6 billion over seven years to Akamai's cloud, Akamai announced on September 24. The contract can grow by up to another $9 billion, which would bring it to about $20 billion. In return for the commitment, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for about 7.7 million shares, roughly 5% of its common stock, at an exercise price of $111.33 per share.

Two parts of the filing are more interesting than the headline number. The first is what Anthropic is buying. Akamai's press release and 8-K describe the deal as support for Anthropic's "accelerating CPU workload demands" on Akamai Cloud's distributed infrastructure. That is CPU capacity, not the GPU clusters that usually dominate AI infrastructure deals. The second is the warrant. Akamai CEO Tom Leighton said it is the first time the company has agreed to a warrant as part of a cloud deal with a customer, per The Next Web.

What the contract says

The warrant vests in two stages, according to Akamai's 8-K. About 2% of Akamai's outstanding common stock vests with the base $11.6 billion commitment. The remaining roughly 3% vests only if the relationship expands, at about 1% for each additional $3 billion of cloud services Anthropic buys within the seven-year term. The equity is tied directly to spending: Anthropic gets a larger share of Akamai only by becoming a larger customer.

Akamai is paying heavily to deliver. It estimates capital expenditures of about $5.5 billion for the initial commitment. The Next Web notes that figure is more than six times Akamai's total 2025 capital spending. The company also raised its 2026 capex by about $1.7 billion to secure and prepurchase supply chain components, memory among them. Akamai left its 2026 revenue guidance unchanged, so most of the revenue arrives in later years.

Leighton put numbers on that ramp. He expects $150 million to $300 million of Anthropic revenue in the contract's first year, rising to an annual run rate of about $1.7 billion by 2028, per The Next Web. For scale, SiliconANGLE reports Akamai's Cloud Infrastructure Services revenue was $99 million in the second quarter, up 39% year over year. If the ramp holds, one customer would be many times larger than Akamai's whole cloud infrastructure business today.

Investors reacted accordingly. Akamai shares rose more than 20% in after-hours trading on Thursday, per SiliconANGLE and Reuters.

Why CPUs

Neither company said exactly which workloads will run on the capacity, and neither disclosed how much capacity the money buys or when it comes online. Any explanation of the CPU focus is therefore inference.

The inference is still reasonable. Anthropic's recent products are agents that run for long periods, write and execute code, operate browsers and call tools. Training and model inference run on accelerators, but much of the work around an agent does not: sandboxes that execute generated code, browser sessions, test runs, data processing and orchestration. That work runs on general-purpose servers, and it grows with the number of agent tasks rather than with model size. A company selling agentic coding at scale would need a large, distributed CPU fleet near its users, which is close to how Akamai describes its network of thousands of points of presence.

This is also not a new relationship. Bloomberg reported on May 8 that Anthropic had signed a $1.8 billion computing deal with Akamai, which Akamai first disclosed in its first-quarter report as a seven-year commitment from an unnamed frontier model company. Four and a half months later, the commitment is more than six times larger.

Part of a much larger buildout

Akamai is one supplier among many. Reuters reported that Anthropic separately agreed to spend $45 billion renting capacity at Nscale's West Virginia data center campus. The Next Web lists a $10 billion agreement with Volta signed in August, a reported $13.7 billion contract with Rum Group, chip supply from Google and SpaceX, and Anthropic's first data center lease in Australia. All of this comes as Anthropic prepares for an IPO.

The warrant fits a pattern that has drawn criticism across the industry: suppliers and customers taking stakes in each other, which makes it harder to read how much of the demand is independent. The Next Web raised that concern directly. The structure here is narrower than some. Anthropic is not investing cash in Akamai. It receives the right to buy shares at a fixed price, and most of that right depends on actually buying more cloud services. Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne told Reuters the warrant "can be seen as a vote of confidence in the durability of AI-driven cloud demand."

What it means

For Akamai, this changes what kind of company it is. A content delivery and security business is committing more than six years of its prior capex to serve one AI customer, and giving that customer a financial reason to stay. Execution risk now sits mostly with Akamai: it has to buy memory and servers in a tight market and deliver on a timeline it has not disclosed.

For Anthropic, the deal says something about where its costs are heading. The large announced compute commitments have mostly been about accelerators. This one is about the ordinary servers that agents need to do work. If agentic products keep growing, CPU capacity may become a larger share of the infrastructure bill than it has been, and labs that locked in distributed capacity early will have an advantage. That last point is a forecast, not a disclosed fact, but Anthropic just committed up to $20 billion on the assumption that it is true.