Anthropic committed $11.6 billion over seven years to Akamai's cloud infrastructure, with a potential expansion of up to $9 billion more—a structure that inverts the typical venture playbook where chipmakers invest in AI labs.
The deal, announced Thursday, is Akamai's largest contract ever. It dwarfs a previous $1.8 billion agreement between the two companies reported in May, making the new pact more than six times larger.
Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant granting nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares—roughly 5 percent of Akamai's outstanding stock at $111.33 per share. About 2 percent vests upon Anthropic's initial payment. Each additional $3 billion in spending unlocks roughly another 1 percent of the stake. This equity sweetener is unusual: suppliers to AI labs rarely offer customers equity warrants tied to purchase volume.
AMD used a similar structure with OpenAI last year, linking warrants to chip-purchase milestones. Anthropic itself has secured investments from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and AMD while buying chips and compute from those same companies—a pattern CEO Dario Amodei acknowledged in December his company participates in at smaller scale than some competitors.
The deal highlights a less-publicized constraint in AI infrastructure: CPUs. While GPU spending dominates headlines, demand for general-purpose processors—which handle code execution, web serving, and the branching logic of AI agents—has risen as models move beyond pure inference toward agentic workloads. Akamai did not specify Anthropic's use case.
Akamai expects zero revenue from the deal this year. The company projects $150 million to $300 million in 2027 revenue starting in the second half, scaling to an annual run rate of $1.7 billion by end-2028. To supply that capacity, Akamai will spend approximately $5.5 billion. The company is also allocating an additional $1.7 billion in capital spending this year to pre-position memory and components ahead of full implementation.
The commitment carries contingencies. Akamai's filing notes the deal depends on meeting specific delivery and service-availability requirements. Both parties retain termination rights under certain conditions.
Akamai shares rose 17 percent in after-hours trading Thursday.
