Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has entered into a massive cloud infrastructure agreement with Akamai Technologies, committing to spend $11.6 billion over a seven-year period, according to an announcement made by Akamai on Thursday. The figure dwarfs an earlier deal between the two companies - a $1.8 billion arrangement that was first reported in May - making the new agreement more than six times larger than its predecessor.

The deal is not unconditional. According to Akamai's securities filing, the agreement is subject to the company meeting specific delivery benchmarks and service-availability standards. Either party also retains the right to exit the contract under certain defined circumstances, meaning the full value of the commitment is not guaranteed.

A Record-Setting Agreement With a Focus on CPU Infrastructure

The arrangement marks the largest commercial deal in Akamai's history and adds to a growing pattern of Anthropic securing substantial compute resources as it scales its AI operations. Beyond its sheer size, the deal stands out for what it signals about the direction of AI infrastructure investment - specifically, a renewed focus on central processing units, or CPUs.

While much of the AI industry's hardware conversation has centered on graphics processing units and specialized AI accelerators, demand for CPUs has been climbing alongside the rise of AI agents - software systems capable of carrying out multi-step tasks autonomously. CPUs handle a broad range of general computing work, including running code and managing web-based processes. Akamai did not disclose the specific workloads Anthropic intends to run on this infrastructure.

Revenue Timeline and Capital Investment

Akamai does not expect to record any revenue from the arrangement during the current year. Speaking on an investor call Thursday, company executives outlined a financial ramp-up that begins in the second half of 2027, with projected revenue in that year ranging between $150 million and $300 million. By the close of 2028, the company anticipates the deal will be generating revenue at an annualized rate of approximately $1.7 billion.

To support the infrastructure buildout required by the agreement, Akamai expects to invest around $5.5 billion in capital expenditure. The company is also accelerating its procurement strategy, adding roughly $1.7 billion to its capital spending for the current year in order to purchase components such as memory chips ahead of schedule.

Warrant Structure Offers Anthropic a Potential Equity Stake

As part of the overall arrangement, Akamai has issued Anthropic a warrant - a financial instrument granting the right to purchase shares at a predetermined price. The warrant covers nonvoting preferred stock that is convertible into 7.7 million common shares, representing up to approximately 5% of Akamai's outstanding stock, at a price of $111.33 per share.

Roughly 2% of that potential stake is expected to vest once Anthropic makes its first payment under the deal. The remaining portion is tied directly to Anthropic's ongoing spending levels. For every additional $3 billion Anthropic commits to Akamai's cloud services, approximately another 1% of the warrant unlocks. This structure means the total value of the agreement could grow by as much as $9 billion beyond the initial commitment, potentially reaching around $20 billion in aggregate.

According to reporting from Bloomberg, this is the first time Akamai has attached a warrant to a cloud services contract, and the arrangement stands as the largest deal in the company's corporate history.

Reversing the Typical Pattern of AI Investment Deals

The structure of this warrant is notable because it inverts a dynamic that has become increasingly common in the AI sector. In what observers have referred to as circular AI deals, technology suppliers - including chipmakers and cloud platform providers - have routinely made direct investments in the AI laboratories that purchase their products. This creates a financial loop in which money flows from labs to suppliers and back again in the form of equity stakes.

In the Akamai-Anthropic arrangement, however, the direction is reversed: the supplier is offering its customer a potential ownership stake, one that scales in proportion to how much the customer spends. This approach is not entirely without precedent. Semiconductor company AMD used a comparable mechanism in a deal with OpenAI last year, linking warrant milestones to chip purchase commitments.

Anthropic itself has been a recurring participant in conventional circular investment arrangements. Major technology companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AMD have all invested or committed to invest in Anthropic while simultaneously supplying the company with chips or cloud computing capacity. In an interview with The New York Times last December, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei acknowledged the company's participation in such deals but indicated that Anthropic does not engage in them at the same scale as some of its peers in the AI industry.

Market Reaction

Investors responded positively to the news. Shares of Akamai Technologies rose by as much as 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, reflecting market confidence in the long-term revenue potential the agreement represents for the company.