A seven-year commitment, and a stake to match
Akamai said on Thursday that Anthropic has committed $11.6 billion over seven years to run workloads on Akamai Cloud, and that it has issued Anthropic a warrant that could eventually hand the AI company close to 5 per cent of Akamai.
The unusual part is what the capacity is for. Akamai describes the commitment as support for Anthropic’s “accelerating CPU workload demands” across a distributed network of thousands of points of presence — general-purpose compute, not the GPU clusters that dominate the industry’s infrastructure announcements. Serving a frontier model involves a great deal of work that never touches an accelerator: request routing, retrieval, sandboxes for tool use, and the ordinary machinery of an API used at scale.
How the warrant works
The equity is tied to the spending. Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant to buy non-voting convertible Series B preferred stock equal to 7.7 million shares of Akamai common stock on an as-converted basis — up to roughly 5 per cent of shares outstanding — at an exercise price of $111.33 a share.
About two percentage points of that vest in connection with the $11.6 billion commitment itself. The remaining three points vest only if Anthropic expands the deal by up to a further $9 billion within the warrant’s seven-year term, at roughly one percentage point for each additional $3 billion of purchases. If Anthropic spends everything available to it, the contract is worth a little over $20 billion and the stake reaches its ceiling.
What it costs Akamai to say yes
Akamai put its own number on the build. The company estimates about $5.5 billion of capital expenditure to serve the $11.6 billion commitment, and said it expects roughly $1.7 billion of additional 2026 capital spending on supply-chain components and memory — an acknowledgement that memory, in particular, has to be secured well before the racks are needed. Akamai said the agreement does not change its 2026 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 in the announcement.
The pattern this belongs to
Anthropic has been buying capacity in large, long blocks and paying for some of it in paper. The structure here — a multi-year purchase commitment paired with warrants that vest as the buyer spends — turns a supplier into something closer to a partner, and gives the supplier a reason to build ahead of demand. It also concentrates risk: Akamai is committing billions of dollars of capital against one customer’s forecast.
What to watch is the second tranche. The first roughly 2 per cent is effectively settled; the other 3 per cent is a public scoreboard of whether Anthropic’s CPU demand grows the way both companies expect. Akamai’s quarterly capital expenditure, and any disclosure of further vesting, will show it before either company issues another press release.
