On September 24, 2026, Akamai Technologies announced that Anthropic had committed approximately $11.6 billion over seven years to Akamai Cloud. Akamai’s press release says the capacity will support Anthropic’s “accelerating CPU workload demands” using Akamai’s distributed infrastructure, and that the deal can grow by up to an additional $9 billion, for a total potential commitment of about $20 billion. The accompanying Form 8-K says the two companies signed Project Plans 2 and 3 on September 18, 2026 under a master services agreement dated May 5, 2026, and that Akamai now treats that agreement as material.
As part of the deal Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for non-voting convertible Series B preferred stock equal to about 7.7 million common shares, or up to roughly 5% of Akamai’s outstanding common stock, at an exercise price of $111.33 per common share. About 2% is expected to vest with the $11.6 billion commitment; the rest vests about 1% for each additional $3 billion of services Anthropic buys. Akamai estimates about $5.5 billion of capital expenditure tied to the commitment, including roughly $1.7 billion more in 2026 to pre-purchase components such as memory. The same 8-K discloses a Lenovo hardware agreement and a Jabil build request covering about $1.7 billion of memory components.
The structure mirrors the equity-for-commitment deals that have become common in AI infrastructure: a supplier hands the buyer an equity kicker in exchange for a very large multi-year purchase. What is unusual is the supplier and the workload. Akamai is best known as a content delivery and security network, and the stated demand is CPU capacity rather than GPUs or other accelerators, a sign that agentic and tool-using workloads create large general-purpose compute needs alongside model training and inference.
What the filing does not show: the commitment is subject to delivery and service-availability requirements and to termination rights, including Anthropic’s right to end a project plan after a material outage, so the $11.6 billion is contracted value rather than guaranteed revenue. Akamai says it expects no impact on its 2026 revenue guidance, and neither document says which Anthropic services will run on the capacity.