Anthropic to get up to 5% Akamai stake in $11.6 billion cloud deal

Anthropic is set to get a warrant for up to a 5% stake in Akamai Technologies as part of an expanded seven-year cloud infrastructure agreement worth $11.6 billion, as the AI company continues to secure computing capacity to support the growing demands of its models.

Under the agreement announced by Akamai on September 24, Anthropic will receive a warrant to purchase non-voting convertible Series B preferred stock representing 7.7 million Akamai shares on an as-converted basis, or up to approximately 5% of Akamai’s common stock outstanding. The warrant has an exercise price of $111.33 per share.

Around 2% of Akamai’s common stock is expected to vest against Anthropic’s initial $11.6 billion commitment. The remaining 3% is tied to a potential expansion of the agreement by another $9 billion over the seven-year term. Each additional $3 billion of cloud services purchased by Anthropic would result in the vesting of roughly 1% of Akamai’s common stock, according to the company.

Akamai shares rose 22% in extended trading following the announcement, reflecting investor reaction to the size and duration of the Anthropic commitment.

The agreement gives Anthropic access to Akamai Cloud’s distributed infrastructure and software, with the focus initially on supporting its growing CPU workload requirements. The companies had already been working together, but Thursday’s announcement significantly expands the relationship.

“Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale,” said Dr. Tom Leighton, co-founder and CEO of Akamai.

“Akamai has an unparalleled reputation for helping our customers achieve their business-critical goals and build the future. Our expanding global footprint, combined with our years of experience serving the world’s largest enterprises, positions us to be the infrastructure provider for secure and responsible AI applications and workloads,” Leighton added.

Anthropic’s growing AI infrastructure bill

The Akamai agreement is part of a broader push by Anthropic to lock in the computing infrastructure required to train and operate increasingly capable AI models.

The deal can expand to as much as $20 billion if Anthropic takes up the additional $9 billion in capacity. Akamai estimates that capital expenditure directly related to the initial $11.6 billion commitment will be around $5.5 billion.

Akamai also expects to increase its 2026 capital expenditure by approximately $1.7 billion to secure and pre-purchase critical components, including memory, needed to support the agreement. The company said the deal would not affect its 2026 revenue guidance. 

For Akamai, the agreement represents a major bet on the infrastructure demand being generated by frontier AI companies. Akamai said the new commitment comes on top of more than $2.8 billion in multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services commitments announced across its customer base earlier this year.

The scale of Anthropic’s infrastructure requirements has been growing rapidly. The company has been signing agreements across cloud computing, data centres, and hardware as it expands its AI operations. According to media reports, Anthropic had agreed to spend $45 billion to rent AI cloud computing capacity from Nscale’s West Virginia data centre campus, while signing several similar deals with AWS, Google, etc.