Anthropic signs $11.6bn seven-year deal for Akamai's CPUs

Anthropic has committed $11.6 billion over seven years to Akamai's cloud, Akamai announced on Thursday, September 24. The deal can grow by up to $9 billion more, to a total potential commitment of about $20 billion, and Akamai has given Anthropic a warrant for up to about 5% of its stock.

Look at what Anthropic is buying. Akamai's release says the capacity will "support CPU workload growth at scale". Bloomberg reported that Akamai will supply central processing units, "a type of generalist chip that's seen renewed demand in data centers where it's helping support AI services". This is a contract for general-purpose processors, not for the graphics chips that dominate most talk of AI spending.

Why an AI lab wants ordinary processors

Neither company has said which Anthropic services will run on the capacity, and the release says nothing about GPUs, inference or regions. The likelier reading is that the demand comes from agents. When a model works as an agent, much of the job happens between model calls: running code, calling tools, fetching pages, keeping track of state. That work runs on ordinary processors, and the more agents run, the more of it there is.

Akamai's finance chief, Ed McGowan, pointed to power when he explained the choice to analysts: "this particular deal is CPU, so you get much better flow through in terms of the efficiency on power," he said, according to a Forbes contributor's account of the investor call.

Akamai spends first and gets paid later

Akamai estimates about $5.5 billion of capital spending tied to the commitment. It is adding about $1.7 billion to its 2026 capital budget to "secure and pre-purchase critical supply chain components, including memory", and it expects no effect on 2026 revenue.

The money comes later. McGowan told analysts that revenue should begin in the second half of 2027, at $150 million to $300 million for that year, Forbes reported. Chief executive Tom Leighton told Bloomberg in an interview: "By the time we're through to 2028, it'll be an annual run rate of about $1.7 billion". To pay for the build, McGowan said, Akamai has $4.6 billion in cash and a $1 billion credit line.

A warrant that rewards Anthropic for spending more

The warrant covers non-voting convertible preferred stock equal to 7.7 million Akamai common shares, or up to about 5% of the company, at an exercise price of $111.33 a share. About 2% vests with the $11.6 billion commitment, and each further $3 billion of cloud purchases vests about 1% more. Leighton said the warrant "provides incentives for future business and growth".

Investors approved. Akamai shares jumped 17% in late trading on Thursday to $129.60, Bloomberg reported, comfortably above the exercise price. So the more Anthropic spends at Akamai, the more of Akamai it can own, at a price the market has already passed.

Where this fits in Anthropic's hunt for compute

Bloomberg describes Anthropic as on a buying spree for computing, "tapping companies from Alphabet Inc.'s Google to Elon Musk's SpaceX for access to chips". It reported that the new contract builds on an earlier $1.8 billion computing deal between the two companies. Akamai says the commitment adds to more than $2.8 billion in multi-year cloud infrastructure commitments across its customers that it announced earlier in 2026.

Who gains is plain enough. Akamai, best known for delivering web content, gets a seven-year anchor customer for its cloud business. Anthropic gets capacity outside the largest cloud providers, plus a possible equity stake. Who carries the risk is just as plain: Akamai commits billions of dollars before the first revenue arrives, much of it for a single customer.

What to watch: whether the capacity comes online in the second half of 2027 as planned, whether Anthropic ever says what runs on it, and whether other AI labs start signing large contracts for plain processors.