Akamai announced an $11.6 billion contractual commitment from Anthropic last night. Seven years. And what Anthropic is buying is CPU capacity, not GPU time. The stock jumped more than 20% after hours.
What the commitment covers
Anthropic commits $11.6 billion over seven years to Akamai Cloud. Akamai frames it around Anthropic’s accelerating CPU workload demand and points to its distributed network of thousands of points of presence. Anthropic can expand by up to another $9 billion, which would take the total to roughly $20 billion.
For scale: every other multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services commitment Akamai has announced this year adds up to $2.8 billion. That business brought in $99 million in the second quarter, up 39% year over year.
Part of the payment is Akamai stock
The more interesting part sits further down the release. Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for non-voting convertible Series B preferred stock covering 7.7 million common shares on an as-converted basis, at an exercise price of $111.33. That is up to about 5% of shares outstanding.
Roughly 2% vests with today’s commitment. The remaining 3% depends on Anthropic buying more: each additional $3 billion of cloud services vests about another 1%, within the warrant’s seven-year term.
What it costs Akamai
Akamai puts capital expenditure tied to the $11.6 billion commitment at about $5.5 billion. It is also raising 2026 capex by roughly $1.7 billion to secure and pre-purchase supply chain components, memory explicitly among them. The 2026 revenue guidance does not change.
The two have history. In May, Akamai disclosed a $1.8 billion commitment from an unnamed frontier lab, and the stock rose more than 26% on the news. That the customer was Anthropic came out a day later.
The customer is paying with the supplier’s capital
Anthropic gets compute and a claim on the company supplying it. Akamai gets a contract that multiplies its cloud business overnight and hands over up to 5% of itself for it. Who is financing whom here is not a rhetorical question: Akamai is putting $5.5 billion into plant that Anthropic is expected to fill over the next seven years.
Then there’s the CPU part. The whole market talks about GPU scarcity, but an agent that spends hours calling tools, reading files and collecting results burns ordinary compute doing it. That is what Anthropic is buying here, on a network that sits close to users. It says more about the next two years of product planning than any model announcement does.