Anthropic to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years in cloud deal

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Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai’s cloud infrastructure, Akamai said Thursday. That’s more than six times the size of a $1.8 billion deal between the two companies that Bloomberg reported in May. The commitment isn’t ironclad; according to Akamai’s securities filing, it depends on Akamai meeting certain delivery and service-availability requirements, and either company can end the agreement under certain conditions.

The deal is the largest in Akamai’s history and continues Anthropic’s compute gobbling-streak. It also represents a bet on a less-hyped corner of AI infrastructure: CPUs. Demand for CPUs, the general-purpose chips that handle work like running code and browsing the web, has grown as AI agents take on more tasks, though Akamai didn’t say what Anthropic will use them for.

Akamai won’t see revenue from the deal this year. On an investor call Thursday, executives said they expect $150 million to $300 million in 2027, starting in the second half, with revenue reaching an annual pace of about $1.7