Anthropic signs $11.6B Akamai CPU deal, with an equity warrant attached

Why it matters

Anthropic is committing billions to CPU capacity as well as the infrastructure behind model development. The contract gives Akamai a large, long-term customer while linking part of Anthropic's potential equity stake to further purchases.

Anthropic, led by co-founder and chief executive Dario Amodei, has signed a seven-year computing agreement with Akamai worth $11.6 billion, securing CPU capacity for the AI company's growing workloads. The deal also gives Anthropic a warrant for a potential stake of up to about 5% in Akamai, tying a large infrastructure purchase to a longer-term commercial relationship, according to Akamai's announcement and Bloomberg.

For Amodei, whose career has run through research at Google Brain and OpenAI before he co-founded Anthropic, the contract puts a price and a term on a basic requirement of the business: computing capacity that can keep up with the products Anthropic is building. His personal biography says he led work on large language models including GPT-2 and GPT-3 at OpenAI and earned a doctorate in biophysics at Princeton. Anthropic began as a research-focused company; it now has to secure infrastructure at a scale that requires multi-year commitments and substantial capital outlays from its suppliers.

The contract is for CPUs

Akamai says its cloud infrastructure and software will support Anthropic's CPU workload growth. The announcement describes general computing capacity, not a commitment to GPU training capacity. That distinction gives the deal a different emphasis from the better-known race to secure accelerators for training large models: Anthropic is also contracting for the computing needed around its AI services, though the companies have not specified the particular workloads, deployment locations, CPU capacity or service start date.

The agreement carries a seven-year term and an $11.6 billion contractual commitment. Akamai says the relationship could grow by up to another $9 billion during that term, taking the potential total to approximately $20 billion. That additional amount is an option for expansion, not part of the initial commitment. The company says each additional $3 billion in cloud purchases, subject to mutually agreed terms, would vest roughly another 1% of Akamai's common stock through the warrant.

The warrant covers non-voting convertible Series B preferred shares representing 7.7 million Akamai common shares on an as-converted basis, at an exercise price of $111.33 per share. Akamai expects around 2% of its common stock to be represented by the portion vesting with the initial commitment. The remaining approximately 3% depends on Anthropic expanding its purchases. The exercise price is specified; the announcement does not provide a separate valuation for the warrant.

Akamai is committing capital, too

Akamai estimates approximately $5.5 billion in capital expenditures tied to the initial $11.6 billion commitment. It also said it expects to increase 2026 capital spending by about $1.7 billion to secure and pre-purchase supply-chain components, including memory. Akamai said the deal would not affect its 2026 revenue guidance. Those figures show the contract's significance for Akamai as well: it is a large customer commitment that requires the infrastructure provider to spend years ahead of delivering the full service.

For Anthropic, a long-term contract can help secure capacity as demand grows, while the warrant gives it a potential financial interest in a supplier whose infrastructure it will use. The structure aligns incentives, but also concentrates the relationship: Anthropic is making a major multi-year purchase, and part of the equity upside depends on buying still more. The expansion terms leave room for Anthropic to scale its commitment without treating the full $20 billion as already booked.

RuntimeWire reported on September 23rd that Anthropic had launched a Claude Marketplace bringing software, connectors and consultants into one catalog. The day before, it released Claude Opus 5.5, expanding the product side of its business. Those launches do not establish what drove the Akamai contract or how its capacity will be allocated. They do put the infrastructure agreement alongside a visible push to make Claude available through more products and channels.

The public terms leave important operating details open: neither Akamai's announcement nor Bloomberg's report specifies when service begins, how much CPU capacity Anthropic will receive, or which workloads will run on it. The disclosed amount is a seven-year contractual commitment, while the additional $9 billion remains conditional on expansion. For now, the clearest signal is the duration and scale of Anthropic's commitment to CPU infrastructure, alongside a warrant that could make its supplier a significant equity holding if the relationship grows.