Anthropic Signs $11.6 Billion Compute Deal With Akamai

AI developer Anthropic has signed a seven-year compute agreement valued at $11.6 billion with cloud services provider Akamai, marking the largest contract in Akamai's history. Under the deal, Akamai will supply CPU compute capacity to support Anthropic's growing artificial intelligence services.

As part of the agreement, Akamai issued Anthropic warrants to purchase Class B shares convertible into 7.7 million shares of common stock at $111.33 per share. A portion of the warrants, representing approximately 2% of Akamai's common stock, will vest when the compute agreement begins in the second half of 2027, with the remainder vesting over the seven-year term. Akamai said this marks the first time it has agreed to such a warrant arrangement in a cloud deal with a customer.

According to Bloomberg, Akamai expects capital expenditures related to the Anthropic agreement to total about $5.5 billion, more than six times its spending for all of 2025. CEO Tom Leighton said most of the spending will go toward hardware such as servers, chips and network equipment, with the bulk expected next year. The company forecasts revenue from Anthropic of $150 million to $300 million in 2027, reaching an annualized run rate of approximately $1.7 billion by 2028.

The agreement builds on an earlier $1.8 billion compute deal between the two companies. As demand for Anthropic's Claude software has surged, the company has also sought chips from providers including Google and SpaceX. The CPU, a general-purpose chip, is seeing renewed demand in data centers supporting AI workloads. The transaction has also drawn attention from Wall Street over so-called circular AI deals, in which cloud providers, hardware companies and AI startups invest in each other while buying each other's products.