Anthropic signs $11.6 billion cloud deal with Akamai
The seven-year contract includes warrants for up to 5% of Akamai's stock and pushes Anthropic's total compute commitments past $500 billion in under a year.
Anthropic agreed to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years for cloud capacity, Reuters reported, pushing the AI lab's total compute commitments to roughly $517 billion in under a year.
The deal, reported by The Decoder, includes warrants letting Anthropic acquire up to 5% of Akamai's stock — 2% tied to the current contract, and another 3% if the agreement grows by as much as $9 billion more. Akamai's shares jumped 22% in after-hours trading on the news.
Akamai expects roughly $5.5 billion in capital costs plus another $1.7 billion in spending before the end of 2026 to build out the capacity, according to the report. Anthropic previously committed $45 billion to cloud provider Nscale for a similar buildout.
https://x.com/mark_k/status/2103421891914367471
On X, an account tracking the deal, mark_k, said the agreement is unusual because it covers CPU capacity rather than GPUs. That is the ordinary compute a frontier lab needs to run the systems around its models, not to train them. Neither company has confirmed the detail.
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has warned the company faces bankruptcy risk if its revenue projections miss, while OpenAI's Sam Altman has separately cautioned against what he called "unsustainable silliness in compute buildouts."