Anthropic Signs $11.6B Akamai Deal for CPU Compute

Anthropic has signed one of the largest compute contracts ever handed to a company better known for delivering web pages. Akamai announced on 24 September a seven-year, $11.6 billion commitment from Anthropic to Akamai Cloud, with an option for Anthropic to add up to $9 billion more. At full size that is roughly $20 billion. Akamai’s shares rose as much as 20% in after-hours trading.

The notable word in the announcement is CPU. Akamai says the capacity will support Anthropic’s “CPU workload growth at scale” rather than the GPU clusters that train and serve frontier models. Akamai does not spell out which workloads those are. But agents are the likely reason the demand is growing: every Claude Code session, sandboxed tool call and browser action runs on general-purpose processors around the model, and Anthropic has spent the year shipping products that run for hours on their own. Akamai pitches its cloud as a continuum from core data centres out to thousands of edge locations, built on “diversified hardware”.

The two companies already had a relationship. Techstrong.ai notes that Anthropic made a $1.8 billion commitment to Akamai in May that had not been announced at the time, which puts Akamai’s contracted portfolio with Anthropic at about $14.4 billion including the new deal. Akamai expects this agreement to bring in $150 million to $300 million of revenue in 2027, ramping to an annualised run rate of about $1.7 billion by late 2028.

The deal also gives Anthropic a stake in its supplier. Akamai has issued a warrant for non-voting convertible preferred stock equal to up to roughly 5% of its common shares, about 7.7 million shares on an as-converted basis, at an exercise price of $111.33. About 2% vests with the $11.6 billion commitment; a further 1% vests for each additional $3 billion of cloud services Anthropic buys, up to 3% more. It echoes the warrant AMD gave OpenAI in 2025: the customer’s spending is what earns it equity, which keeps both sides tied to the contract.

For Akamai it is an expensive bet. The company expects to spend about $5.5 billion in capital expenditure to deliver the capacity, and has raised its 2026 capex by roughly $1.7 billion for supply-chain components and memory, without changing this year’s revenue guidance. “Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale,” chief executive Tom Leighton said.

For Anthropic it is one more supplier in a spread that already runs from Google’s TPUs and AWS to a data centre campus in Queensland. The GPU race gets the headlines, but this contract is a sign that the bill for AI no longer comes only from the accelerators. Running agents at scale takes a lot of ordinary servers as well, and Anthropic is now signing multi-year contracts for them.