Product2 publishers3 min readPublished
Anthropic's $11.6 billion CPU contract with Akamai puts delivery risk on the seller
Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on Akamai cloud capacity built around CPUs, if Akamai meets delivery and availability targets. Akamai has to build that capacity first, for a customer that can end the contract under certain conditions.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Akamai said the agreement is built around CPU workloads, where it described Anthropic's demand as accelerating.
- In May, Akamai disclosed a $1.8 billion, seven-year commitment from an unnamed frontier model company that Bloomberg identified as Anthropic.
- Akamai expects no revenue from the deal this year, $150 million to $300 million in the second half of 2027, and an annual pace of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028.
- Akamai granted Anthropic a warrant for up to about 5% of its stock at $111.33 a share, with about 2% vesting at the first payment and roughly 1% per further $3 billion committed.
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Why it matters
- cost Akamai's shareholders pay for a build-out equal to nearly half the contract's value before revenue ramps, and the customer can leave if delivery falls short.
- exposure Anthropic's spending alone would outweigh Akamai's existing cloud infrastructure business several times over, so that unit's results will move with one customer.
- precedent After AMD with OpenAI and now Akamai with Anthropic, AI labs negotiating with infrastructure suppliers have two public cases of a seller paying for purchase commitments in stock.
A developer asks an agent to fix a failing test. Part of that job is the model deciding what to change. The rest is running the code and checking the result. TechCrunch describes running code and browsing the web as work for general-purpose CPUs, and reports that demand for those chips has grown as agents take on more tasks [5].
Akamai chief executive Tom Leighton pitched something wider. He said Akamai's global footprint and years serving large enterprises put it in a position to be "the infrastructure provider for secure and responsible AI applications and workloads" [12]. What Anthropic is buying is CPU capacity served from a network of thousands of points of presence [6]. Akamai did not say what Anthropic will run on it [5], so the tie to agents comes from TechCrunch's reading of chip demand.
Revenue arrives slowly. Spread evenly, $11.6 billion over seven years is about $1.66 billion a year [1], close to the pace executives expect to reach by the end of 2028 [7]. Their 2027 range works out to 9% to 18% of that average year [2]. Akamai said the deal leaves its 2026 revenue guidance unchanged [11].
Akamai spends first. It expects about $5.5 billion in build-out costs, about 47 cents for each dollar of committed revenue [3]. It is also adding about $1.7 billion to this year's capital budget to buy memory and other components in advance [8]. Anthropic's commitment holds only while Akamai meets the delivery and service-availability requirements in its securities filing [3].
For the unit doing the selling, the contract is large. Akamai's Cloud Infrastructure Services revenue was $99 million in the second quarter, up 39% from a year earlier [14]. Four quarters at that rate is about $396 million, so the planned $1.7 billion pace from Anthropic alone is about 4.3 times the unit's current annualized revenue [4].
The equity runs from seller to buyer. In the more common pattern, suppliers invest directly in the AI labs that buy their products, TechCrunch noted [16]. Vesting the rest of Akamai's warrant after the first payment takes about $9 billion more in commitments, enough to lift the deal to about $20 billion [5]. Bloomberg reported this is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud deal [10]. AMD used a similar structure with OpenAI last year [15].
For a team pricing its own agent product, the contract suggests a two-by-two. One axis asks where a task spends its time: in the model, or in the tools the agent calls. The other asks who absorbs a late delivery: a buyer locked into a commitment, or a seller whose customer can leave. On paper, Anthropic's contract sits in the corner where the work is in the tools and the seller absorbs the delay. The filing supports the seller half [3]. The tools half rests on Akamai's statement that Anthropic's CPU demand is accelerating [4].
What to watch
- Anthropic's first payment under the contract, the event that vests about 2% of the Akamai warrant.
- Akamai's second-half 2027 results against the $150 million to $300 million executives guided, the first public sign of whether capacity is being delivered.
- Any statement from Anthropic or Akamai on what the CPU capacity will run, which would confirm or undercut the reading that agent workloads are driving the purchase.