Anthropic also received a warrant that could give it up to a 5% stake in the cloud company. Akamai shares jumped 22% in extended trading.
Akamai Technologies signed an $11.6 billion cloud services deal with Anthropic on Thursday and issued a warrant that could give the artificial intelligence company up to a 5% stake in Akamai. The company’s shares surged 22% in extended trading.
The seven-year contract secures a long-term commitment from one of the fastest-growing AI companies. It adds to more than $2.8 billion in multiyear cloud infrastructure deals announced by Akamai across its customer base this year.
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Terms of the warrant
The warrant gives Anthropic the right to buy Series B shares at $111.33 each, which convert into about 7.7 million shares of Akamai common stock.
A portion representing about 2% of Akamai’s outstanding common stock is tied to Anthropic’s $11.6 billion commitment. The remaining 3% would vest if the companies expand the agreement by up to another $9 billion.
Akamai’s spending
Akamai said total capital expenditure related to the initial commitment is estimated at about $5.5 billion.
The company expects no effect on its annual revenue forecast. It expects its 2026 capital spending to rise by about $1.7 billion to secure and pre-purchase components needed to support the agreement, including memory.
Separately, Akamai authorized the electronics firm Jabil to purchase about $1.7 billion worth of memory components under an existing services agreement.
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Anthropic’s computing push
Anthropic, which is preparing an initial public offering, has been aggressively expanding its computing power and securing the infrastructure needed to train and run increasingly powerful models. That has led to multibillion-dollar deals with cloud and data-center providers.
Last month, Reuters reported that Anthropic agreed to spend $45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale’s data center campus in West Virginia.
“Despite growing concerns about potential adverse consequences of agentic AI, infrastructure investment will continue to expand to support increasingly compute-intensive agentic workloads,” said Jacob Bourne, an analyst at Emarketer. He said the potential stake “can be seen as a vote of confidence in the durability of AI-driven cloud demand.”
