Anthropic and Akamai sign a $11.6 billions computing power agreement, marking the largest contract in Akamai's history

Record-Breaking Order Reshapes Akamai’s Business Landscape

This multi-billion-dollar contract will have a direct impact on Akamai’s financial planning.

According to Bloomberg, Akamai estimates that capital expenditures related to the Anthropic agreement will total about $5.5 billion, a figure more than six times its full-year 2025 spending.

Akamai CEO Tom Leighton said in an interview that most of the capital expenditure planned to fulfill the contract will be allocated to hardware such as servers, chips, and network equipment, and will mainly occur next year.

Despite the substantial increase in capital expenditure, the expected returns are significant. Akamai expects revenues from Anthropic’s business to reach $150 million to $300 million next year.

Tom Leighton indicated that by 2028, the annualized income from this segment will reach about $1.7 billion. He emphasized that the company’s cloud business is growing at a very fast pace, and at this rate, revenue from cloud contracts may “soon” surpass other traditional business units.

Equity Bundling Draws Wall Street Scrutiny

This contract includes a unique equity arrangement.

The warrants issued by Akamai to Anthropic grant the latter the right to purchase Series B shares at a price of $111.33 per share, which can be converted into 7.7 million common shares.

Akamai stated that a portion of the warrants, representing about 2% of its common stock, will vest along with the compute power agreement expected to commence in the second half of next year, while the remainder will be gradually unlocked over the seven-year term of the contract.

This has raised concerns among some Wall Street investors. The market remains wary of so-called “circular AI deals,” where cloud service providers, hardware companies, and AI startups directly invest in each other while purchasing each other’s products, making it increasingly difficult to quantify the true market demand for AI.

In response, Tom Leighton stated this is Akamai’s first time agreeing to such warrant arrangements in a cloud deal with a customer. He believes it is a significant move and, under the current circumstances, a reasonable one that helps strengthen the relationship between the two companies.

Anthropic’s Compute Power Demand Continues to Soar

This $11.6 billion contract is built on the companies’ $1.8 billion compute agreement reached earlier this year.

In recent months, as large numbers of customers have flocked to Anthropic’s Claude software to simplify programming and other workflow tasks, market demand for the software has surged dramatically.

To meet this ever-growing demand, the AI developer has embarked on major compute purchases, seeking chips not only from Akamai but also from companies ranging from Google to SpaceX.

The CPUs involved in the agreement, as a type of general-purpose chip, are experiencing a revival in data centers supporting AI services.