Akamai signs an $11.6 billion cloud contract with Anthropic and grants it a warrant for up to 5% of its shares

Akamai Technologies has closed a cloud services deal worth $11.6 billion with Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the assistant Claude. As part of the agreement, Akamai has issued a warrant that could grant Anthropic up to a 5% stake in Akamai itself, news that sent the company's shares up 22% in after-hours trading once the deal became known.

The seven-year contract includes a warrant giving Anthropic the right to buy Series B shares at $111.33 each, convertible into approximately 7.7 million Akamai common shares. Of that warrant, a portion equivalent to around 2% of Akamai's outstanding common stock is tied directly to the $11.6 billion commitment already signed, while the remaining 3% would only vest if the two companies expand the agreement by up to an additional $9 billion.

The deal adds to more than $2.8 billion in multi-year cloud infrastructure contracts that Akamai had already announced this year with various customers, reinforcing its positioning as an infrastructure provider for large-scale AI workloads.

On the financial side, Akamai estimates that the total capex associated with this initial commitment will be around $5.5 billion. The company has said it does not expect any impact on its annual revenue forecasts, but does expect an increase of approximately $1.7 billion in its 2026 capital spending, earmarked for securing and pre-purchasing components needed to support the agreement, including memory. In parallel, Akamai has authorized electronics firm Jabil to purchase close to $1.7 billion in memory components under an existing services agreement between the two.

The move fits into Anthropic's strategy as it heads toward an IPO and has been aggressively expanding its computing capacity to train and run increasingly powerful models, leading it to close multibillion-dollar deals with various infrastructure and data center providers. As Reuters reported last month, the company had already committed $45 billion to leasing AI computing capacity at Nscale's data center campus in West Virginia.

Jacob Bourne, an analyst at Emarketer, noted that despite growing concern over the potential adverse consequences of agentic AI, infrastructure investment will continue to expand to support increasingly compute-intensive workloads. Anthropic's eventual equity stake in Akamai, he said, can be read as a vote of confidence in the durability of AI-driven cloud infrastructure demand.

Taken together, the deal illustrates a trend recurring among the large AI labs: rather than simply paying for computing capacity, companies like Anthropic are securing equity positions in their infrastructure providers, further intertwining the financial incentives of model developers and the companies that physically underpin their growth.