Eleven billion, six hundred million dollars over seven years — that's the bet Akamai just placed on becoming an AI compute supplier rather than just a content delivery network. Its stock jumped nearly 20% in after-hours trading Friday after the company disclosed an expanded contract with Anthropic.
Under the deal, Akamai Cloud will handle a slice of Anthropic's CPU workloads, providing distributed infrastructure and software to run and serve Claude models. The contract runs seven years and can grow by another $9 billion if Anthropic buys more capacity. To deliver on it, Akamai plans roughly $5.5 billion in capital spending, plus an extra $1.7 billion in 2026 alone to secure memory and other components that are in short supply across the industry.
Anthropic isn't just paying cash. In exchange, Akamai issued a warrant for convertible Series B preferred stock — the right to about 7.7 million common shares, close to 5% of the company, at a strike price of $111.33. The stake vests in stages: part for the initial $11.6 billion commitment, more as Anthropic spends beyond that in $3 billion increments. Trading compute for equity has become the default structure for big AI infrastructure deals this year — suppliers want more than revenue, they want a piece of their customer's upside.
For Akamai, known for two decades as a DDoS-protection and content-delivery company, this is a pivot into AI infrastructure, a market already crowded with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and CoreWeave. For Anthropic, it's one more name on a growing list of compute partners that includes Nvidia, Microsoft and even former bitcoin miner TeraWulf. Spreading bets across more suppliers cuts dependence on any single cloud, but it also makes it harder to tell whether every partner can actually scale on time.
Akamai co-founder and CEO Tom Leighton called Anthropic a company "advancing the AI revolution" and said he was glad it chose Akamai. The deal doesn't change 2026 revenue guidance — the payoff shows up later, once the capacity is actually running. For now, the real question isn't the money or the warrants. It's whether Akamai can physically deliver the compute it just promised.
