Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion on Akamai's cloud over seven years and can earn the right to buy up to 5 per cent

Anthropic has committed about $11.6 billion over seven years to Akamai Technologies’ cloud, Akamai announced on 24 September 2026. The money buys CPU capacity, the general-purpose processors inside every server, and Tom Leighton, Akamai’s co-founder and chief executive, called it “the largest contract in our company’s history” on a call with investors that evening.

Akamai pays part of the price in its own stock. It gave Anthropic a warrant for up to 7.7 million Akamai shares, about 5 per cent of the company, at $111.33 each, $861.8 million in all, and the warrant vests as Anthropic’s spending grows. “Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale,” Leighton said in the announcement.

Anthropic is renting dedicated servers for seven years

Anthropic and Akamai signed two new orders, Project Plan 2 and Project Plan 3, on 18 September 2026, and Anthropic committed to pay about $11.6 billion across them, according to Akamai’s Form 8-K. Both sit under a master services agreement dated 5 May 2026, under which Akamai provides “dedicated cloud computing capacity and related managed support services”. Each plan runs for seven years from its own service start date, and the warrant agreement names the product as “Akamai Dedicated Compute Regions”.

The commitment is subject to Akamai meeting delivery and service availability requirements, and Anthropic can end a plan after a material outage, subject to conditions. Anthropic can also end the whole agreement if a direct competitor of Anthropic takes control of Akamai.

The first big Anthropic contract came in May. Akamai’s first-quarter results on 7 May reported that a “leading, U.S. based frontier model provider” had committed $1.8 billion over seven years, and Bloomberg named the customer as Anthropic the next day, citing anonymous sources. The new contract is more than six times that size.

Why is Anthropic buying CPUs?

Akamai says the contract supports Anthropic’s “accelerating CPU workload demands”, in the words of its release, and Ed McGowan, Akamai’s chief financial officer, told investors that “this particular deal, the one we announced today, is all CPU”. Bloomberg described CPUs as “a type of generalist chip that’s seen renewed demand in data centers where it’s helping support AI services”. Anthropic’s earlier chip deals were for the accelerators that train and run its models, such as AMD’s Instinct MI450 GPUs.

Anthropic’s engineers have described where that kind of work sits in an AI agent. They wrote in April that Anthropic’s hosted agents separate the “brain”, meaning “Claude and its harness”, from the “hands”, the “sandboxes and tools that perform actions”. A sandbox, in Anthropic’s description, is “an execution environment where Claude can run code and edit files”, which is ordinary server work. Anthropic names Claude Code as one harness the design can carry, and custom tools connect through the Model Context Protocol.

Akamai has pitched for exactly this work. Robert Blumofe, its chief technology officer, wrote two days after that post that Anthropic’s design leaves open “where inference happens, where sandboxes run, and where tools execute”, and that “the compute fabric underneath is exactly what companies like Akamai provide”. McGowan put the demand more bluntly on the call: “There’s an awful lot of CPU that’s needed to run all this.” Akamai runs more than 4,000 points of presence across 700 cities in 130 countries, Leighton said.

How does Anthropic’s warrant work?

Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant on 18 September 2026 covering 7,741,020 Akamai shares at $111.33 each, about 5 per cent of the company. It is written as 387,051 shares of non-voting Series B preferred stock at $2,226.60 each, and each of those converts into 20 ordinary shares. The $111.33 price is Akamai’s average share price, weighted by volume, over the 30 trading days before the issue date.

Forty per cent of the warrant vests with Anthropic’s first payment under Project Plan 3. Three more tranches of 20 per cent each vest as Anthropic commits a further $3 billion, $6 billion and $9 billion. Anthropic must pay the exercise price in cash, and the vested warrant can be exercised until 18 September 2033. The preferred shares carry no votes except where Delaware law requires them, and turn into ordinary shares only when Anthropic transfers them outside its own group.

Akamai’s chief executive, Tom Leighton, put the value of the first tranche at “a little over $150 million” and the whole 5 per cent at “less than $400 million”. Akamai deducts the warrant’s fair value from revenue over the life of the contract, and Ed McGowan, its chief financial officer, said that cost “is included in the $11.6 billion total”. At the 25 September close the shares under the warrant were worth slightly more than Anthropic would pay for them.

Equity has flowed the other way in Anthropic’s earlier compute deals. Nvidia and Microsoft committed in November 2025 to invest up to $10 billion and up to $5 billion in Anthropic, and in July AMD agreed to invest up to $5 billion alongside a deal for up to 2 gigawatts of its chips. Those suppliers bought into their customer; Akamai offers its customer a stake in itself.

Akamai will spend $5.5 billion to build the capacity

Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion over roughly two years to deliver the $11.6 billion contract, starting with about $1.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2026 to pre-buy components including memory, chief financial officer Ed McGowan said on the call. That $1.7 billion lifts Akamai’s 2026 capital spending and is part of the $5.5 billion. For scale, Akamai’s capital spending for the whole first half of 2026 was $552.9 million.

The supply chain moved in the same week. On 24 September Akamai authorised Jabil, its contract manufacturer, to buy about $1.7 billion of memory components, and on 23 September it signed a hardware agreement with Lenovo whose first statement of work runs for seven years. The deal leaves Akamai’s 2026 revenue guidance of $4.445 billion to $4.53 billion, set on 6 August, where it was.

McGowan called the contract “take-or-pay”, with Akamai “guaranteed payment upon delivery”. Once fully ramped, its $1.7 billion a year is more than a third of all the revenue Akamai expects to book in 2026.

Akamai’s shares jumped 16 per cent, then gave most of it back

Akamai’s shares reached $128.46 on 25 September 2026, 16.3 per cent above the previous close, then closed at $113.94, up 3.2 per cent, according to Nasdaq’s trading record. Akamai published the deal after the market closed on 24 September, a day on which its shares had fallen 6.8 per cent. Volume on 25 September was 31.9 million shares, eight times the 3.9 million traded on 23 September.

The first, smaller deal moved the stock further. On 8 May, the day after Akamai reported the unnamed $1.8 billion commitment with its first-quarter results, the shares closed at $147.71, up 26.6 per cent. At the 25 September close Nasdaq put Akamai’s market value at about $16.4 billion, so the $11.6 billion contract equals about 71 per cent of it.

Anthropic accounts for most of Akamai’s big cloud contracts this year

Akamai has signed about $14.4 billion of large multi-year cloud contracts in 2026, and $11.6 billion of it is Anthropic’s new commitment, chief financial officer Ed McGowan said on 24 September. If the May contract is Anthropic’s too, as Bloomberg reported, the AI company accounts for about $13.4 billion of the total. Akamai expects the whole portfolio to need 95 to 105 megawatts of power and to bring in about $2.2 billion a year once it is running.

Tom Leighton, the chief executive, said Akamai already works with “all the major players” in AI, including the hyperscalers. Anthropic’s side of the bargain grows with its bills: every further $3 billion it commits adds about 1 per cent of Akamai to its warrant, until the warrant expires on 18 September 2033.