Akamai lands big Anthropic deal valued up to $20 billion

Akamai landed a cloud deal with Anthropic that could be worth as much as $11.6 billion over seven years. The deal, which is focused on distributed infrastructure and software, revolves around CPU workloads and point to edge AI use cases.

Under the terms of the deal, Akamai said Anthropic could spend up to an additional $9 billion that can bring the deal to $20 billion. In addition, Akamai issued a warrant to Anthropic to buy a stake worth up to 5% of the company.

Akamai's cloud infrastructure business has been gaining momentum in recent deals. While Akamai does have GPU offerings, the boom in AI inference is what makes the company's distributed infrastructure attractive.

Key terms of the deal include:

• Anthropic has a warrant to purchase 7.7 million shares of Akamai's common stock at an exercise price of $111.33 a share.
• Two percent of the warrant to Anthropic vests today with the remaining 3% vesting over the terms of the contract. Each $3 billion purchase of cloud services is a vesting event.
• Akamai will allocate $5.5 billion in capital expenditures to support the Anthropic deal.
• Akamai said there is no impact to 2026 revenue guidance, but the company will spend $1.7 billion more on capex for the year. The capex is to secure supply chain components including memory.

Dr. Tom Leighton, Akamai CEO, said the Anthropic deal represents traction for its AI business. "Our expanding global footprint, combined with our years of experience serving the world’s largest enterprises, positions us to be the infrastructure provider for secure and responsible AI applications and workloads," he said.

• Akamai acquires LayerX
• Akamai Inference Cloud deploys Nvidia AI Grid

For the first six months of 2026, Akamai reported net income of $185.7 million on revenue of $2.17 billion. Akamai's cloud business is growing 39% for the same time period, but is the company's smallest business with revenue for the six months ended June 30 of $194 million.

Akamai is projecting total revenue for 2026 to be between $4.44 billion and $4.53 billion.