TL;DR

Anthropic has agreed to spend $11.6bn on Akamai cloud services over seven years. In return, Akamai has granted a warrant that could hand Anthropic as much as 5% of the company. Akamai’s shares rose 22% in extended trading on Thursday. The deal dwarfs the $1.8bn agreement the pair reached in May.

How the warrant works

According to Reuters, the warrant lets Anthropic buy Series B shares at $111.33 each, which convert into roughly 7.7 million Akamai common shares. The stake comes in two parts. About 2% of Akamai’s outstanding stock is linked to the $11.6bn commitment itself. The other 3% only vests if the two companies widen the agreement by as much as a further $9bn.

Akamai puts the capital spending for the initial commitment at around $5.5bn. It is raising its 2026 capital budget by about $1.7bn to buy components up front, memory among them, and does not expect the deal to change its revenue forecast for the year. Separately, it has authorised the contract manufacturer Jabil to purchase roughly $1.7bn of memory under an existing agreement.

Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said infrastructure spending would keep growing to serve “increasingly compute-intensive agentic workloads”, and described the possible stake as “a vote of confidence in the durability of AI-driven cloud demand”.

A pattern of compute deals

In May, Anthropic’s earlier Akamai contract was worth $1.8bn. This one is more than six times larger, and the equity link turns a supplier arrangement into something closer to a partnership: Anthropic could end up owning part of the company it is paying.

It also sits alongside Anthropic’s commitment last month to spend $45bn renting capacity at Nscale’s West Virginia campus. Nscale, a London-based firm, is the UK-linked piece of that picture, but the computing it supplies Anthropic is in the US. With a stock market listing ahead, Anthropic has been signing multibillion-dollar capacity deals with a widening set of cloud and data-centre firms.

Looking forward

The next marker is whether the optional $9bn expansion is triggered, which would release the rest of the warrant. For UK businesses buying AI services, these deals show frontier labs spreading their computing across more suppliers, including firms outside the big three clouds.