Anthropic Signs $11.6 Billion AI Cloud Infrastructure Contract with Akamai

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On September 24, Akamai Technologies announced an expansion of its partnership with Anthropic, with the two parties having signed two new project plans for dedicated cloud computing capacity and related managed support services. Under the agreement, subject to meeting delivery and service availability requirements, Anthropic will pay Akamai approximately $11.6 billion over a seven-year period to support its growing CPU-based AI workloads.

Akamai will leverage its distributed cloud infrastructure to provide Anthropic with dedicated compute power and software services. This contract focuses on CPU workloads, differentiating it from the many AI infrastructure contracts in the market centered on GPU training clusters. Akamai Cloud currently covers large-scale distributed nodes from core to edge, capable of supporting AI application development, deployment, and operation.

To fulfill this contract, Akamai expects cumulative capital expenditures of approximately $5.5 billion. Of this, approximately $1.7 billion is planned for investment in the fourth quarter of 2026 for advance procurement of memory and other key supply chain components; approximately $3.1 billion is expected in 2027, with a further approximately $700 million in 2028. Related services are expected to commence by the end of the second quarter of 2027, with $150 million to $300 million in revenue expected to be recognized in 2027, reaching an annualized revenue run rate of approximately $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.

The two parties have also reserved additional room for subsequent expansion. Anthropic may further increase its cloud service procurement by up to $9 billion over the seven-year period, bringing the potential total partnership scale to approximately $20 billion. Each additional $3 billion in cloud service procurement will unlock warrants corresponding to approximately 1% of Akamai's shares.

As part of this partnership, Akamai has granted Anthropic warrants for non-voting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million shares of Akamai common stock, representing up to approximately 5% of Akamai's existing common stock on a fully converted basis, with an exercise price of $111.33 per share. Of this, approximately 2% of the shares correspond to the current $11.6 billion contract, while the remaining approximately 3% is tied to subsequent additional procurement of up to $9 billion.

This contract builds on the master services agreement signed by the two parties in May of this year. Akamai disclosed that prior to this transaction, the company had already secured more than $2.8 billion in other multi-year cloud infrastructure service contracts this year; Anthropic's $11.6 billion contract represents one of Akamai's largest cloud infrastructure partnerships to date.