Anthropic signs $1.8 billion cloud computing deal with Akamai
TL;DR:
- Anthropic has signed a $1.8 billion computing deal with Akamai Technologies to meet demand for its AI software, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.
- Akamai shares jumped roughly 28% in regular trading after the company disclosed a long-term cloud arrangement with an unnamed frontier-model provider in its earnings statement.
- Resultsense view: this is the second major Anthropic compute deal in a week, after a tie-up with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and signals that frontier labs are deliberately routing inference workloads outside the AWS-GCP-Azure hyperscale group.
The reported deal comes as Anthropic chases enough capacity to keep up with usage of Claude, with frontier-model providers increasingly visible as the largest single buyers of accelerated compute. Akamai chief executive Tom Leighton told Reuters the company is in a good position to secure both the CPUs and GPUs needed for the contract, even as component prices have risen.
What the deal covers
Akamai had already flagged a long-term cloud agreement with a frontier-model provider in its earnings statement earlier in the week without naming the partner. Its shares rose 25% on the day of that disclosure and were up about 28% at $149.05 in regular trading on Friday after the Bloomberg report identified Anthropic as the counterparty.
The cloud and cybersecurity firm forecast second-quarter revenue of $1.08 billion to $1.10 billion, broadly in line with analyst expectations. Both Anthropic and Akamai declined to comment on the Bloomberg report.
A pattern of non-hyperscaler compute
The Akamai contract is the second large external compute commitment Anthropic has disclosed this week. On Wednesday the company said it had reached a deal to tap the computing resources of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, framed as a rapprochement with a previous critic. Anthropic already runs heavily on Amazon Web Services, and the new agreements point to a strategy of locking in supply outside the hyperscaler triumvirate before competitors do the same.
For UK enterprise buyers, the relevance is the shape of the market they will be procuring from over the next 24 months. The Competition and Markets Authority is already examining concentration in UK cloud services, where Microsoft, AWS and Google sit at the centre of both general compute and AI-related services. Frontier-lab moves towards specialist providers like Akamai and SpaceX add real-world evidence that diversification is technically possible at scale, not just a regulatory aspiration.
Looking forward
Expect more of the same as Anthropic, OpenAI and others compete for what Akamai’s own CEO acknowledged is a constrained supply of GPUs. The interesting question for UK readers is whether any of the new compute supply gets routed through UK-resident infrastructure — a gap that domestic providers, including Argyll’s newly-launched sovereign AI cloud, are now openly positioning themselves to fill.