Akamai's Anthropic Cloud Deal Expands to as Much as $20B

Akamai Technologies signed a contract to provide cloud computing infrastructure to Anthropic for $11.6 billion over a seven year term to support growing CPU workloads. The agreement includes options for additional expansions of up to $9 billion, which would bring the total commitment to roughly $20 billion. Akamai plans to spend $5.5 billion on capital expenditures to build capacity, including $1.7 billion this year for memory components through a consignment arrangement with Jabil. Shares of Akamai rose more than 20% in post market trading following the announcement. Under the terms of the pact, Anthropic received warrants for up to 5% of Akamai, with 2% vesting upon the initial deal and the remainder tied to future cloud spending. Akamai also signed a separate hardware and services agreement with Lenovo with terms extending up to seven years to further ramp up its infrastructure.