en.Wedoany.com Reported - US cloud infrastructure service provider Akamai Technologies has signed a seven-year, $1.8 billion cloud computing infrastructure service agreement with AI lab Anthropic, marking the largest single order in Akamai's 28-year history. Akamai CEO Tom Leighton confirmed during the company's Q1 2026 earnings call that it had reached the agreement with a "leading frontier model provider," and Bloomberg subsequently confirmed, citing sources familiar with the matter, that the customer is Anthropic.

Revenue from the agreement is expected to begin being recognized in Q4 2026, contributing approximately $20 million to $25 million that quarter. The contract follows a consumption-based pricing model. Akamai Executive Vice President and CFO Ed McGowan revealed that the company plans to complete all hardware procurement required to fulfill the contract within the next 12 months and has already secured supply chain readiness. McGowan also noted that the contract includes a price adjustment mechanism to address potential hardware price fluctuations over a six-month period.

Anthropic will lease Akamai's globally distributed cloud resources over seven years, focusing on edge inference for AI models, low-latency interaction, and large-scale deployment. Akamai operates over 4,300 nodes across 700 cities in 130 countries, with its network positioned closer to end users, capable of compressing inference response times to milliseconds, making it suitable for AI agents, real-time conversations, and low-latency application scenarios. Leighton stated that these AI leaders chose Akamai because their AI workloads require the scale, performance, and reliability of the Akamai cloud platform. Akamai ultimately prevailed in competition against both hyperscale cloud providers and new cloud entrants, with its ability to manage complex distributed systems and its low-latency characteristics proving to be key advantages.

Prior to this signing, Anthropic had already entered into multiple large-scale compute agreements with companies including Google Cloud and SpaceX. Its collaboration with SpaceX involves the full capacity of the Colossus 1 data center, adding over 300 megawatts of computing power and more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently stated at a conference that the company's annualized revenue and product usage in Q1 2026 grew to 80 times previous levels, and that it is acquiring more computing resources "as fast as possible" to meet the surging inference demand for its Claude models.

For Akamai, the agreement validates the company's strategic shift from a traditional content delivery network to a distributed AI cloud service provider. In Q1 2026, Akamai's cloud infrastructure services revenue reached $95 million, a year-over-year increase of 40%, making it the fastest-growing segment among its three major business lines; the traditional security and content delivery businesses are undergoing structural adjustments. If the $1.8 billion order is successfully fulfilled over seven years, it could contribute an average of approximately $257 million annually in cloud infrastructure services revenue.

Founded in 1998 by MIT Professor of Applied Mathematics Tom Leighton and his student Danny Lewin, Akamai started based on distributed network and content delivery algorithms. After expanding into the cybersecurity business, it acquired Linode in 2022 for $900 million, gaining a complete public cloud stack and forming a distributed computing network comprising 26 core data centers and over 4,300 edge nodes. Following the integration of Linode, Akamai possesses a unique architecture that synergizes core cloud and edge nodes, laying the infrastructure foundation for handling large-scale AI inference workloads.

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