MarketsAKAMSEP 26, 2026

Akamai locks $11.6B, seven-year Anthropic CPU deal — with a path to $20B

AKAM jumped as much as 17% after-hours after disclosing a seven-year commitment from Anthropic, a warrant for up to 5% of its stock, and $1.7B of pre-purchased memory.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

Akamai disclosed a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud-infrastructure commitment from Anthropic on Sept. 24, with a path to roughly $20 billion, and the market treated it as a repricing event: AKAM rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading, per TechCrunch citing the Wall Street Journal, with Reuters clocking an extended-hours move around 15%.

The structure is the story. Anthropic isn’t just buying capacity, it’s taking equity. The 8-K describes a non-voting Series B preferred convertible warrant covering 7.7 million common shares at a $111.33 conversion price, ultimately up to about 5% of shares outstanding. Roughly 2% vests against the initial $11.6 billion; each additional $3 billion of committed spend vests approximately another 1%, capped at $20 billion. Akamai has now attached equity to a cloud contract for the first time in its history, and it’s the largest deal the company has ever signed.

Anthropic will run CPU workloads on Akamai Cloud’s distributed infrastructure, according to the release, which doesn’t specify the use case. TechCrunch’s read is more useful: demand for CPUs, the general-purpose chips that handle work like running code and browsing the web, has grown as AI agents take on more tasks. Inference at agentic scale is a CPU story, not just a GPU one.

The paper trail is unusually legible. Per Quartz’s read of the filing, a master services agreement was signed May 5, two underlying project plans on Sept. 18, a Lenovo hardware supply deal on Sept. 23, and on Sept. 24 Akamai authorized Jabil to purchase roughly $1.7 billion of memory components. That’s the same figure as the 2026 capex increase disclosed in the 8-K. Buildout capex tied to the commitment runs near $5.5 billion.

Guidance is deliberately narrow. No change to 2026 revenue; $150 million to $300 million expected in 2027; an annual run-rate near $1.7 billion by end-2028, executives said on Thursday’s investor call. Delivery and service-availability conditions exist, with mutual termination rights.

This slots alongside a broader repricing already underway in the compute stack, visible in Nscale’s $103.4B backlog S-1 and Nscale’s $30B NYSE IPO. Frontier labs are no longer renting capacity. They’re financing it, with equity as the tie.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.