Anthropic signs an $11.6 billion contract with Akamai for AI cloud infrastructure

Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) announced on September 24, 2026, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, a significant expansion of its commercial relationship with Anthropic through a contractual commitment of $11.6 billion spread over seven years. According to Akamai's own statement, the agreement will serve to support Anthropic's growing demand for CPU workloads, drawing on Akamai's distributed AI infrastructure and Akamai Cloud software.

The company notes that this contract comes on top of the more than $2.8 billion in multiyear Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) commitments that Akamai had already announced earlier this year across its customer base, reflecting — in the company's own words — growing demand from customers looking to build, deploy and operate AI workloads at scale.

One of the most striking elements of the announcement is the deal's financial structure: as part of this strengthened strategic alignment between the two companies, Akamai has issued Anthropic a warrant (a purchase option) to acquire non-voting convertible Series B preferred shares, equivalent to 7.7 million Akamai common shares on a fully converted basis — that is, up to approximately 5% of Akamai's share capital — at an exercise price of $111.33 per share. Of that warrant, a portion equivalent to roughly 2% of Akamai's capital will vest in connection with the $11.6 billion commitment announced today, while the remaining 3% would vest as a possible expansion of up to an additional $9 billion materializes within the warrant's seven-year term. The statement specifies that each additional purchase of $3 billion in cloud services, on mutually agreed terms, will trigger the vesting of approximately 1% more of Akamai's capital. Adding the initial commitment and that potential expansion, the total potential commitment would be around $20 billion.

This type of structure — in which an infrastructure provider grants equity in exchange for long-term purchase commitments — has become common in the large AI infrastructure contracts signed by labs such as Anthropic with compute providers in recent times, and in this case it directly ties both parties' incentives to the future success and growth of the commercial relationship.

As for the financial impact on Akamai, the company estimates that the total capital expenditure (capex) associated with this $11.6 billion commitment will be around $5.5 billion. Akamai says it does not expect any impact on its 2026 revenue guidance, but does anticipate an increase of approximately $1.7 billion in its 2026 capex, earmarked for securing and pre-purchasing critical supply chain components, including memory.

Dr. Tom Leighton, Akamai's co-founder and chief executive officer, said that "Anthropic is driving the AI revolution and we are delighted they have chosen Akamai's capabilities to build and operate AI infrastructure at scale," adding that the company's expanding global footprint, combined with its experience serving the world's largest enterprises, positions it as an infrastructure provider for secure and responsible AI applications and workloads.

The statement also describes Akamai Cloud as a platform supporting a compute continuum from core to edge, with a distributed network of thousands of points of presence and diversified hardware, designed so that customers can run applications and optimize how they are delivered to users and agents throughout those applications' life cycle in the AI era.

Beyond the figures, the agreement is significant because it confirms the scale of the compute needs Anthropic continues to take on to sustain the growth of its models and services, and because it marks the entry of Akamai — traditionally known as a content delivery network (CDN) and cybersecurity provider — as a relevant player in the race to supply cloud and AI infrastructure at scale, thereby competing, at least partly, on terrain dominated until now by the large hyperscalers. It is worth noting that Akamai's statement includes the usual legal warnings about "forward-looking statements," acknowledging that the expected benefits of the transaction, the evolution of the relationship with Anthropic and the impact on the company's financial guidance are subject to risks and uncertainties, and that actual results could differ from those projected.