Anthropic signs US$11.6 billion cloud deal with Akamai, gets warrant for up to 5% stake

ANTHROPIC has committed to spending US$11.6 billion on cloud services from Akamai Technologies in its latest AI infrastructure deal, with the cloud company issuing a warrant that could give the AI lab a stake of up to 5 per cent.

Under the seven-year contract, the warrant gives Anthropic the right to purchase Series B shares at US$111.33 each that converts into about 7.7 million shares of Akamai’s common stock. Akamai shares jumped about 20 per cent in extended trading on Thursday.

IPO-bound Anthropic has been aggressively expanding its computing power and securing the infrastructure needed to train and run increasingly powerful models, driving multibillion-dollar deals with cloud and data-centre providers.

It agreed to spend US$45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale’s West Virginia data centre campus, Reuters reported last month.

“Despite growing concerns about potential adverse consequences of agentic AI, infrastructure investment will continue to expand to support increasingly compute-intensive agentic workloads,” said Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne.

The potential stake “can be seen as a vote of confidence in the durability of AI-driven cloud demand.”

A portion of the warrant representing about 2 per cent of Akamai’s common stock outstanding is tied to Anthropic’s US$11.6 billion commitment, while the remaining 3 per cent would vest if the companies expand the agreement by up to another US$9 billion.

Akamai said the total capital expenditure related to the initial commitment is estimated to be about US$5.5 billion.

The deal adds to more than US$2.8 billion in multi-year cloud infrastructure commitments Akamai announced across its customer base this year.

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The company expects no impact to its annual revenue forecast, and an increase of about US$1.7 billion in its 2026 capital spending to secure and pre-purchase components needed to support the agreement, including memory.

Separately, Akamai authorised electronics firm Jabil to purchase about US$1.7 billion worth of memory components under an existing services agreement. REUTERS