Anthropic signs $11.6 billion Akamai cloud deal with a 5% warrant

Anthropic signed a seven-year agreement to pay Akamai at least $11.6 billion for cloud infrastructure, with room to add another $9 billion toward about $20 billion total, The Next Web reports Thu Sep. 24, summarizing Akamai’s announcement and Bloomberg. As part of the deal, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant, a contract right to buy stock later at a set price, for 7.7 million shares on an as-converted basis, about 5% of common stock, at an exercise price of $111.33.

About 2% of that stake vests with the base commitment. The remaining 3% vests only if the expansion happens, at 1% per $3 billion of extra services. The warrant takes the form of non-voting convertible Series B preferred, and Akamai CEO Tom Leighton told Bloomberg via TNW it is the first time the company has agreed to a warrant as part of a cloud deal with a customer.

Leighton expects the contract to start in the second half of next year, with $150 million to $300 million in Anthropic revenue next year rising to an annual run rate of about $1.7 billion by 2028. Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion in capital to serve the contract, more than six times what it spent on capital in all of 2025 on Bloomberg’s framing via TNW, and is raising 2026 capital spending by about $1.7 billion to pre-buy supplies including memory.

Akamai shares rose as much as 17% in late trading to $129.60. The deal builds on a prior $1.8 billion agreement between the companies. The Wall Street Journal notes the new commitment adds to upwards of $2.8 billion in existing multi-year cloud commitments across Akamai’s customer base announced this year.

Bloomberg via TNW flags Wall Street concerns about circular AI deals, where buyers and suppliers also take equity stakes in each other. Leighton told Bloomberg the warrant was a serious step that helps bring the companies together. Anthropic was not quoted in Akamai’s announcement.

The same week Trump allies cast Anthropic’s Dario Amodei as the face of AI doomerism, the durable filing is a former web-cache network writing a seven-year cloud check and handing Claude’s lab an equity option Wall Street already argues looks circular.

That equity option is how a CDN, the network that used to speed up web pages, prices its way into the AI power business.

Sources

• Akamai will supply CPUs to Anthropic over seven years in a deal that could reach $20bn – The Next Web
• Anthropic to Pay Akamai Technologies $11.6 Billion Over Seven Years for Cloud Services – The Wall Street Journal