Anthropic’s $11.6 Billion Akamai Deal Flips the Usual AI Financing Script

Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai’s cloud infrastructure, Akamai announced Thursday. It’s more than six times the size of a $1.8 billion agreement between the two companies that Bloomberg reported in May, and it comes with an unusual twist for AI infrastructure spending in 2026: instead of the supplier buying a stake in the AI lab paying it, Akamai is handing Anthropic the equity.

The deal, in Akamai’s own numbers

Akamai’s commitment covers what the company calls Anthropic’s “accelerating CPU workload demands,” delivered through Akamai Cloud’s distributed infrastructure and software, according to Akamai’s own press release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The $11.6 billion figure isn’t the ceiling: the agreement allows for up to an additional $9 billion in expansion, bringing the total potential commitment to roughly $20 billion.

Akamai says the initial commitment will cost it about $5.5 billion in capital expenditures to build out capacity, and the company is separately adding roughly $1.7 billion to this year’s capital spending to secure and pre-purchase components such as memory ahead of demand. On an investor call Thursday, executives said they don’t expect the deal to change Akamai’s 2026 revenue guidance. Real revenue from Anthropic won’t start flowing until 2027, when Akamai expects $150 million to $300 million, before reaching an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028, according to TechCrunch’s report on the call. Akamai’s own press release separately notes the deal adds to more than $2.8 billion in other multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services commitments the company has announced so far in 2026, putting Akamai’s disclosed 2026 cloud-commitment total above $14 billion once this contract is included.

“Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale,” Akamai co-founder and CEO Tom Leighton said in the company’s announcement. “Akamai has an unparalleled reputation for helping our customers achieve their business-critical goals and build the future. 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.”

A warrant that flips the usual script

The mechanics of the equity component are laid out in Akamai’s SEC filing. As part of the agreement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant to purchase non-voting convertible Series B preferred stock representing 7.7 million shares of Akamai common stock on an as-converted basis, or up to approximately 5 percent of Akamai’s outstanding stock, at an exercise price of $111.33 a share. About 2 percent of that stake is expected to vest now, tied to today’s $11.6 billion commitment. The remaining roughly 3 percent vests only if Anthropic keeps expanding the deal: each additional $3 billion in cloud-services spending unlocks about another 1 percent of Akamai’s stock, up to the full $9 billion of expansion room.

That structure runs opposite to the pattern that’s become familiar in recent AI infrastructure deals, in which chipmakers and cloud providers take direct equity stakes in the AI labs buying their products. Akamai’s arrangement is the reverse: the supplier is giving its customer a potential ownership stake in the supplier, one that grows only as Anthropic’s own spending does. It’s the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal, and the contract is the largest in the company’s history, Bloomberg reported.

The closest precedent is AMD’s warrant to OpenAI from October 2025, part of a deal to deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD chips. AMD issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares, or roughly 10 percent of AMD, vesting in tranches as OpenAI’s chip purchases scale from 1 gigawatt to 6 gigawatts and as AMD hits certain stock-price targets, according to AMD’s own announcement. Akamai’s warrant differs in one respect worth noting: it’s priced at $111.33 a share, close to where Akamai stock traded before the announcement, so Anthropic would still have to pay to exercise it. Multiple outlets reported that AMD’s warrant to OpenAI carried a token exercise price by comparison, making it closer to an outright equity grant.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times in December that Anthropic doesn’t participate in these supplier-investor arrangements “at the same scale as some other players,” according to TechCrunch. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD have all invested in or agreed to invest in Anthropic while also selling it chips or cloud capacity, making Akamai’s warrant, running in the opposite direction, an unusual entry in that same ledger.

Why CPUs, not GPUs

Akamai didn’t specify what workloads Anthropic will run on the capacity. The company’s press release frames the deal around supporting “CPU workload growth at scale,” and Akamai has built its cloud pitch around a network of general-purpose compute spread across “thousands of points of presence” rather than the centralized GPU clusters that dominate most AI infrastructure coverage. CPUs, the general-purpose chips that handle tasks like running code and serving web requests, have become more central to AI infrastructure spending as agents take on more of that kind of work, rather than pure model training.

That framing also lines up with how the market reacted. Akamai shares jumped as much as 17 percent in after-hours trading Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported. By Friday afternoon they had settled to a roughly 3 percent gain on the day, changing hands around $113.94, according to The Motley Fool, after touching an intraday high of $128.46. It’s a large single-day swing for a stock with a market capitalization of about $16 billion.

Part of a bigger AI financing debate

The Akamai deal lands in the middle of an ongoing argument over how AI infrastructure spending is actually being financed. Nvidia’s own $3.5 billion investment in MediaTek last month was a more conventional version of the pattern this deal flips: a chip supplier buying into a company it also does business with. Debt-funded infrastructure deals have drawn even sharper scrutiny; central banks including the European Central Bank and the Bank for International Settlements have separately warned about opaque debt structures in AI infrastructure financing, pointing to arrangements like the additional $1 billion Lambda borrowed in August, which was secured by a Microsoft lease commitment rather than by the Nvidia chips it funded.

Akamai’s warrant is a different animal from either of those, since it isn’t collateralized debt at all: it’s an equity instrument backed by nothing more than Anthropic’s own future spending commitments. Whether that makes it more or less risky than the debt-based alternatives depends on whether Anthropic keeps growing into the $9 billion of expansion room the warrant is betting on.