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Anthropic's $11.6 billion Akamai cloud deal comes with a warrant for up to 5% of Akamai

The contract is for CPU capacity, and Akamai is the side handing over equity.

By Think Facility · September 25, 2026 · Anthropic AI infrastructure

On September 24, 2026, Akamai announced that Anthropic has committed to $11.6 billion of its cloud services over seven years. Akamai says the deal will support Anthropic's growing CPU workloads, meaning the general-purpose processors that run ordinary software. The release doesn't mention GPUs, the chips most AI models are trained on.

The news came from Akamai, in a press release it also filed with the SEC. Anthropic's newsroom had no post about it when I checked on September 25.

Commitment

$11.6 billion over seven years

Possible expansion

up to an additional $9 billion

Warrant

up to approximately 5% of Akamai's common stock

Exercise price

$111.33 per share

Announced

September 24, 2026

Akamai is the one giving up equity

What surprised me is which way the stock moves. Akamai is the seller here, and it's also the side that issued a warrant to its customer.

The warrant is for non-voting preferred stock that converts into 7.7 million Akamai shares, at $111.33 each. About 2% of Akamai's stock vests with this week's commitment. The remaining 3% or so vests only as Anthropic buys more: each further $3 billion of cloud services (at terms both companies agree) vests roughly another 1%, up to an extra $9 billion. If Anthropic spends all of it, the relationship comes to about $20 billion.

Tom Leighton, Akamai's co-founder and CEO, gave the only named comment in the release.

What Akamai is spending to serve it

Akamai estimates the capital spending tied to the deal at about $5.5 billion. It's also raising its 2026 capital spending by about $1.7 billion to secure and pre-purchase supply chain components, memory included. Its 2026 revenue guidance doesn't change.

For scale, Akamai had announced more than $2.8 billion of multi-year cloud infrastructure commitments across its whole customer base earlier this year. This single contract is about four times that. The release doesn't say what Anthropic will run on the new capacity. It describes Akamai Cloud as thousands of points of presence, stretching from core data centers out to the edge.

Akamai held an investor call on the deal at 5:30 p.m. Eastern on September 24, and says a replay stays available for two weeks after it.