Akamai has agreed to a $11.6 billion, seven-year deal with Anthropic to supply the cloud infrastructure behind Anthropic’s growing AI workloads, with room to expand the relationship to roughly $20 billion.

Akamai announced the agreement on 24 September. Anthropic will draw on Akamai Cloud’s distributed infrastructure and software to support its accelerating CPU workload demands as the AI company scales its models and products.

A warrant tied to growth

As part of the deal, Akamai has issued Anthropic a warrant to purchase non-voting convertible preferred stock representing up to approximately 5 per cent of Akamai’s common stock outstanding, at an exercise price of $111.33 a share. About 2 percentage points of that stake are set to vest with the $11.6 billion commitment already announced, and the remaining roughly 3 percentage points would vest as the relationship grows, with each additional $3 billion in cloud services purchased vesting a further 1 per cent.

Akamai expects total capital expenditure tied to the $11.6 billion commitment to run to about $5.5 billion. The company says it does not expect the deal to affect its 2026 revenue guidance, though capital expenditure for the year is now projected to rise by about $1.7 billion to secure supply chain components, including memory, ahead of demand.

“Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale,” said Dr Tom Leighton, co-founder and chief executive of Akamai. “Our expanding global footprint, combined with our years of experience serving the world’s largest enterprises, positions us to be the infrastructure provider for secure and responsible AI applications and workloads.”

Part of a wider infrastructure push

The Anthropic agreement adds to more than $2.8 billion in multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services commitments Akamai has announced across its customer base so far this year. Akamai Cloud runs on a distributed network spanning thousands of points of presence, from core data centres to edge locations, which the company positions as suited to running AI applications close to users and agents.

Akamai will host a call for investors on the announcement, with a replay available for two weeks afterwards.