Anthropic has signed a seven-year agreement worth $11.6 billion to lease compute capacity from Akamai, and the deal asks Akamai to spend heavily before the revenue arrives.
The AI company will use Akamai Cloud‘s distributed infrastructure and software to run CPU workloads. Akamai says the contract could grow by another $9 billion, which would lift the total potential commitment to roughly $20 billion.
The cost side stands out. Akamai estimates total capital spending tied to the deal at about $5.5 billion. That includes roughly $1.7 billion added to its 2026 capital expenditures so it can secure and pre-purchase critical supply chain components, memory among them. In other words, Akamai is buying hardware ahead of time to make sure it can deliver.
Equity is part of the package too. Akamai has issued Anthropic a warrant for up to about five percent of its outstanding common stock. Vesting continues only as the agreements expand. Around two percent is expected to vest in connection with the announced commitment, so the larger share depends on Anthropic taking more capacity.
Tom Leighton, Akamai’s co-founder and CEO, said Anthropic chose the company’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale. He added that Akamai’s global footprint and experience with large enterprises position it to support secure and responsible AI workloads.
The focus on CPUs deserves a note. Much of the talk around AI infrastructure centers on accelerators, but this contract points to a need for CPU capacity as well. Neither company has explained which CPU workloads Anthropic plans to run, and the announcement gives no timeline for the optional expansion.
For Akamai, the contract adds to more than $2.8 billion in multi-year cloud commitments it has secured this year. Investors will likely watch how quickly the component spending turns into billable capacity, and whether Anthropic uses the expansion option that unlocks the rest of the warrant.
