Anthropic to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years in cloud deal — SkimNews
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- Anthropic committed $11.6 billion over seven years to Akamai's cloud infrastructure — more than six times the size of a prior $1.8 billion deal between the two companies reported by Bloomberg in May.
- Akamai won't see revenue from the deal this year; executives told investors they expect $150 million to $300 million in 2027 starting in the second half, reaching an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.
- Akamai plans to spend roughly $5.5 billion to build out capacity and is adding about $1.7 billion to this year's capital spending to pre-buy components like memory.
- Anthropic received a warrant for nonvoting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares (up to ~5% of Akamai's outstanding stock) at $111.33 per share — the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal.
- Each additional $3 billion Anthropic commits unlocks another ~1% of equity, meaning the deal could grow by as much as $9 billion to roughly $20 billion in total.
- The warrant flips the common AI-deal pattern in which suppliers invest in labs; AMD used a similar structure with OpenAI last year, and Anthropic also has investment-plus-cloud arrangements with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD.
- Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday, per The Wall Street Journal.
Why it matters: Akamai just locked in its largest deal ever — $11.6B with a $20B ceiling — giving it a compute anchor as AI-agent workloads fuel CPU demand rather than the more-hyped GPU market. The warrant structure is the unusual part: Akamai is handing its customer potential ownership (up to ~5%) rather than the reverse, letting Anthropic convert cloud spending into equity upside. Akamai shares jumped 17% after-hours, but the deal is contingent on delivery requirements and revenue doesn't start until late 2027.
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