Anthropic has signed a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud infrastructure deal with Akamai, the largest contract in the company’s nearly 30-year history. The agreement covers CPU workloads rather than GPU training clusters, and includes an option for an additional $9 billion in commitments that would take the total to roughly $20 billion.
Akamai announced the deal Thursday and detailed it on an investor call. The commitment is more than six times the size of a $1.8 billion agreement between the two companies that Bloomberg reported in May, and it lifts Akamai’s year-to-date signed contract value to about $14.4 billion when combined with $2.8 billion in other multiyear cloud deals signed earlier in 2026.
What Anthropic is actually buying
Unlike most AI cloud deals, which center on GPU capacity for training and inference, this one is built around CPU workloads. Anthropic will use Akamai Cloud’s distributed infrastructure, which spans thousands of locations and more than 4,400 edge points of presence, to run the less glamorous parts of serving AI products: APIs, orchestration layers, data processing and delivery.
The contract is not ironclad. According to Akamai’s securities filing, it depends on Akamai meeting delivery and service-availability requirements, and either company can end the agreement under certain conditions. The underlying master services agreement dates to May 5, 2026, with the two project plans behind the $11.6 billion commitment signed on September 18.
Revenue comes late, spending starts now
Akamai will see no revenue from the deal in 2026. On the investor call, CFO Ed McGowan said revenue begins in the second half of 2027, contributing $150 million to $300 million for the full year, and reaches an annualized run rate of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.
The capital bill comes first. Akamai expects to spend roughly $5.5 billion through 2028 to build the capacity: about $1.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2026 to buy components such as memory in advance, around $3.1 billion in 2027 and roughly $700 million in 2028. The company has $4.6 billion in cash and $1 billion in credit lines and said it may raise more capital if needed.
The combined $14.4 billion in major contracts is expected to produce about $2.2 billion in annual recurring revenue when fully ramped, requiring an estimated 95 to 105 megawatts of power, or roughly $22 million in annual revenue per megawatt.
A warrant ties Anthropic to Akamai’s stock
The deal includes an equity kicker. Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for non-voting convertible preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, about 5 percent of shares outstanding, at $111.33 per share, with a seven-year term.
Vesting follows the money. About 2 percent, roughly 3.1 million share equivalents, vests with the initial $11.6 billion commitment, and the remaining 3 percent vests in 1 percent blocks for each additional $3 billion Anthropic commits, up to the $9 billion option. The structure gives Anthropic an economic stake in its supplier’s performance and gives Akamai a reason to keep the customer spending.
McGowan described the additional $9 billion as an option for future business rather than a milestone-dependent extension. Any exercise of it would require further capital expenditures on Akamai’s side, which is why the company is front-loading component purchases now.
What it says about AI infrastructure
The deal is the latest sign that AI compute demand has spread beyond the GPU layer. Training gets the headlines, but serving millions of users requires enormous amounts of ordinary compute close to users, and that is Akamai’s home turf. A company built for distributing content is repositioning itself as distributed cloud for AI delivery, and the deal landed alongside a quarter in which Akamai’s stock has been re-rated on AI demand.
For Anthropic, the commitment diversifies its infrastructure base beyond the large hyperscalers and locks in capacity at a time when memory and components are scarce. The advance purchase of memory in the fourth-quarter spending plan is a direct response to the DRAM shortage that has pushed component prices sharply higher across the industry this year, with memory costs rippling through laptop, phone and console prices.
For Akamai, the risk is concentration. A single customer now anchors the company’s growth story, and the revenue ramp depends on Anthropic’s own growth holding up. The vesting schedule softens that risk somewhat, since Akamai only gives away equity as the customer actually spends, and the service-availability conditions give both sides an exit if performance slips.
There is also a financing question. Akamai is committing $5.5 billion of capital against a revenue stream that starts in 2027 and takes two years to reach a $1.7 billion run rate. The math works if Anthropic keeps spending, but it leaves little room for a demand pause, and the company has already flagged that it may raise capital.
The deal also fits a pattern across the AI supply chain this year: model labs signing enormous multi-year commitments with infrastructure providers and taking warrants in them as security. Capacity has become the binding constraint on AI growth, and the companies that can lock it in early are paying for the privilege with balance sheets rather than cash flow.
Watch the 2027 revenue ramp as the first real test. Between now and then, the tell will be Akamai’s capital spending landing on schedule and Anthropic making its first payments under the agreement.