Akamai Signs $11.6 Billion, Seven-Year Cloud Agreement with Anthropic - For CPU Workloads, with a Warrant for Up to About 5%

Akamai announced an expanded agreement with Anthropic: roughly $11.6 billion committed over seven years, aimed at CPU workloads rather than GPUs. Akamai issued its customer a warrant for up to about 5% of its outstanding common stock. A look at the terms, the conditions attached, and the wider context of AI infrastructure procurement.

Anthropic Akamai cloud AI-infrastructure compute SEC

Akamai Technologies announced on September 24, 2026 that it had substantially expanded its cloud agreement with Anthropic ¹. According to the Form 8-K the company filed with the SEC, the two entered into Project Plan 2 and Project Plan 3 on September 18 under their existing Master Services Agreement (MSA) dated May 5, 2026, and Anthropic committed to pay approximately $11.6 billion in total under those Project Plans ². Each Project Plan carries an initial term of seven years, counted from its own service start date.

Beyond the headline figure, the announcement has two notable characteristics. One is what the capacity is for: Akamai describes the agreement as supporting the growth of Anthropic’s CPU workloads at scale ¹. The other is how Akamai gets paid. As the supplier of the cloud capacity, it nonetheless handed its customer a warrant giving Anthropic potential upside in Akamai’s own stock ².

The $11.6 Billion Is a Conditional Commitment

It is worth being precise about what the number is. The 8-K states that Anthropic committed to pay the amount “subject to any termination described below and satisfaction of certain delivery and service availability requirements” ². This is not a settled payment obligation but a contractual commitment that presumes Akamai meets the service levels it has promised.

The termination provisions are spelled out. Akamai can end the MSA if Anthropic breaches it and fails to cure. Anthropic can end it for a material uncured breach on Akamai’s side, and also if Akamai comes under the control of one of Anthropic’s direct competitors. Bankruptcy, insolvency or receivership proceedings against either side give the other a right to terminate as well. In addition, Anthropic may terminate each Project Plan upon notice of a material outage, subject to certain conditions ². Cloud availability is wired directly into whether the contract survives.

The MSA itself has not been made public. Akamai says it will be filed as an exhibit to its Form 10-Q for the quarter ending September 30, 2026 ². Unit prices and capacity breakdowns will not be visible until then.

CPUs, Not GPUs

What Akamai foregrounds here is CPUs rather than GPUs. The press release states in its opening bullets that Anthropic will “leverage Akamai Cloud’s distributed infrastructure and software to support CPU workload growth at scale” ¹. Akamai describes Akamai Cloud as reaching across thousands of points of presence, with compute available along the whole path from core to edge.

What Anthropic will actually run on those CPUs has not been disclosed. TechCrunch observes that CPU demand has risen as AI agents take on more work, CPUs being the general-purpose processors behind tasks like running code and fetching web pages, and notes that Akamai declined to specify Anthropic’s use ³. The announcement materials go no further than the category “CPU workloads,” leaving it undetermined whether this is inference, an execution environment for agents, or other foundational processing.

AI labs have continued to lock in compute through 2026. This site has covered cases such as Recursive’s $410 million agreement with AWS, where a research-stage company put most of what it had raised into a single compute contract. Today’s commitment is roughly 28 times that figure, and it names CPUs as the target of the procurement.

A Supplier Handing Its Customer Equity Upside

On the same September 18, Akamai entered into a warrant agreement with Anthropic ². In the press release’s framing, the warrant covers 7.7 million shares on an as-converted common-stock basis, or up to approximately 5% of Akamai’s outstanding common stock, at an exercise price of $111.33 per share of common stock ¹.

The 8-K describes the same instrument more precisely: a warrant to purchase 387,051 shares of Series B Non-Voting Convertible Preferred Stock at an exercise price of $2,226.60 per warrant share ². That figure was set by taking the Nasdaq volume-weighted average price of Akamai common stock across the 30 consecutive trading days before the issue date and multiplying it by 20, since each preferred share initially converts into 20 common shares. Because of that 20:1 conversion, 387,051 preferred shares correspond to 7,741,020 common shares.

Vesting is split into four tranches. The first tranche, 40% of the warrant shares, vests upon the first payment by Anthropic or its subsidiaries or affiliates under Project Plan 3 ². The remaining three tranches, 20% each, vest successively upon each additional $3.0 billion of contractual value Anthropic commits under the MSA. The press release explains the same schedule with outstanding common stock as the denominator: roughly 2% of outstanding common stock is expected to vest in connection with the $11.6 billion commitment announced, and the remaining roughly 3% would vest as the relationship expands by up to an additional $9 billion ¹. Taken to its full extent, the deal leaves room for a total commitment of around $20 billion.

The equity design is built to withhold voting power. The Series B Preferred Stock carries no voting rights except as expressly required by Delaware General Corporation Law, and it converts automatically into common stock only when transferred to someone other than Anthropic and its wholly owned subsidiaries, or if a holder ceases to be part of that group. Holders have no right to elect conversion. The warrant and the warrant shares are transferable only to Anthropic and its wholly owned subsidiaries, and exercises must be settled in cash. Vested portions remain exercisable until the seventh anniversary of the issue date ².

TechCrunch reads the structure as an inversion of the more familiar circular AI deal, in which suppliers such as chipmakers and cloud providers take direct stakes in the AI labs buying from them. Here the supplier is the one extending a potential stake to its customer, and that stake grows in step with Anthropic’s spending. The same article recalls AMD’s deal with OpenAI a year earlier, where warrant vesting was pegged to milestones in chip purchasing ³.

The Timeline Behind the Numbers

Akamai estimates the total capital expenditure related to the $11.6 billion commitment at approximately $5.5 billion ¹. It also intends to raise 2026 capital spending by about $1.7 billion in order to lock in and buy ahead on critical supply chain parts, memory among them, and says its 2026 revenue guidance is unaffected. The investment lands first; the revenue follows.

On when that revenue arrives, TechCrunch reports that on a September 24 investor call, Akamai executives put 2027 at $150 million to $300 million, beginning in the second half of that year, and said the business should be running at roughly a $1.7 billion annualized rate once 2028 closes ³. That part comes from remarks on a call rather than from the announcement materials, and should be treated as a figure that moves if the assumptions do.

Akamai frames the deal as sitting on top of the multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) commitments it has already announced this year across its customer base, which it puts at more than $2.8 billion ¹. Co-founder and CEO Tom Leighton said in the release that Anthropic “is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale.”

Capacity Procurement Feeds Back into Terms of Use

This is not an announcement about a feature or an API anyone can use tomorrow. It still matters for teams building Claude into their work. Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, cutting input and output pricing by 20% against Opus 5, and the terms on which a model is offered are not set independently of how capacity is procured. Claude Code’s weekly limits changed on September 14: announced as a permanent 25% increase, the new level works out to roughly 17% less than the level then in effect, which included a temporary boost. How much you can use, and at what price, rests on capacity secured through supply agreements.

Read that way, what this agreement shows is a timeline: Anthropic locking in capacity that comes online across 2027 and 2028, on seven-year terms, including outside the GPU domain. Because the commitment is conditional, how much capacity actually materializes also depends on the supplier’s performance. That AI infrastructure investment has moved from Big Tech’s capital expenditure to mid-sized cloud players, and that equity is now being enlisted to finance it, is worth watching from the standpoint of supplier balance sheets as well. When the MSA text appears in the 10-Q, the outline of capacity and pricing should come into somewhat sharper view.