AI's silent infrastructure: the $11.6 billion deal between Akamai and Anthropic

On 24 September 2026 Akamai Technologies announced an expansion of its agreement with Anthropic, formalising a contractual commitment of $11.6 billion over seven years, as documented in the company's press release and in the Form 8-K filed with the SEC. The deal, which Bloomberg reported by rounding the figure to $12 billion, includes an option to extend it by a further $9 billion, bringing its total potential value to around $20 billion. To seal the agreement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant to buy non-voting convertible preferred stock equivalent to 7.7 million common shares on an as-converted basis, that is up to roughly 5% of shares outstanding, at an exercise price of $111.33 per share. Of that stake, about 2% vests with the announced commitment, while the remaining 3% or so vests in proportion to any expansion: roughly 1% for every $3 billion of additional services. According to Reuters, the announcement sent Akamai's stock up about 20% in after-hours trading.

The nature of this deal offers a different perspective from the dominant narrative, which focuses almost entirely on graphics processors. The contractual commitment is meant to support Anthropic's demand for CPU compute, drawing on Akamai's distributed infrastructure and cloud software. Historically known for its content delivery network (CDN), Akamai has turned its widespread footprint into a distributed cloud offering. Anthropic's choice suggests that model orchestration, agent management and the surrounding services require large amounts of traditional compute. Akamai co-founder and CEO Tom Leighton said that Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and that Akamai is excited the company chose its capabilities to build and run AI infrastructure at scale. Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne told Reuters that, despite growing concerns about the potential downsides of agentic AI, infrastructure investment will keep expanding to support agentic workloads that demand ever more compute.

Several aspects of the deal, however, remain unclear. The official documents released by Akamai do not specify which workloads Anthropic will run on the CPU capacity, nor do they provide a detailed schedule for service delivery or for revenue recognition over the seven years. It is also worth noting that Anthropic has not published any official statement on the matter: all financial and operational figures come solely from Akamai's disclosures. On the investment side, the provider estimates it will incur around $5.5 billion in capital expenditure tied to the main agreement. For the current year, Akamai expects an increase of about $1.7 billion in capex to buy critical supply-chain components in advance, memory in particular, while stating that its 2026 revenue guidance remains unchanged.

While public attention stays fixed on the scarcity of cutting-edge graphics chips, this deal reminds us that artificial intelligence does not live on GPUs alone. The complex architecture that lets a model talk to the outside world needs a dense network of distributed traditional compute. Using stock warrants to bind compute provider and model developer at the equity level shows, once again, how the AI value chain is consolidating through deep financial ties, a pattern already seen in other large AI compute contracts.

— Olya