Akamai signs $11.6 billion with Anthropic and sees its stock jump 20%

The historic web host has committed to absorbing Anthropic's CPU costs over seven years, with an option to increase the contract to $20 billion.

Akamai announced on September 24 a seven-year, $11.6 billion contractual commitment with Anthropic. The deal is not for GPUs but for the lab's fast-growing CPU workloads, which will be served by Akamai Cloud's distributed infrastructure. An additional $9 billion option could bring the total value of the contract to about $20 billion.

The timetable remains a long way off: the first revenues are not expected until the second half of 2027, reaching an estimated annualized rate of $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. Akamai plans to commit approximately $5.5 billion in investments by 2028 to deploy the necessary capacity. Anthropic has also received warrants representing up to 5% of Akamai's share capital, which are acquired gradually as revenues are actually committed.

The market reacted immediately: the stock climbed as much as 20% after the close. For a company that has been identified with content distribution for twenty-five years, the contract marks an attempt to reposition itself on the inference infrastructure — a segment where the least visible part, the generalist computation that surrounds the models, remains widely available.