Anthropic commits $11.6 billion to Akamai for CPU capacity, not GPUs
Anthropic has committed to pay Akamai approximately $11.6 billion over seven years, and what Akamai says the money buys is CPU capacity rather than GPUs. Akamai's press release of September 24 says the commitment "will support Anthropic's accelerating CPU workload demands by leveraging Akamai Cloud's distributed AI infrastructure and software", and Akamai's Form 8-K describes what it is selling as "dedicated cloud computing capacity and related managed support services". Neither document mentions GPUs.
Akamai will supply dedicated cloud computing capacity for Anthropic's CPU workloads. Image: Anthropic
The two contracts behind the figure are Project Plan 2 and Project Plan 3, entered into on September 18 under a master services agreement between Akamai and Anthropic dated May 5, 2026. Each has an initial seven-year term that starts on its own service start date.
The deal can grow to about $20 billion
Akamai says the arrangement provides for a potential expansion of up to an additional $9 billion, "which represents a total potential commitment of approximately $20 billion". Only the $11.6 billion is contractually committed today, and the rest depends on Anthropic buying more.
For scale, Akamai says the deal "adds to the more than $2.8 billion in multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) commitments across Akamai's customer base previously announced this year". One customer has now committed roughly four times that.
Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for up to 5%
Akamai has issued Anthropic a warrant to buy non-voting convertible Series B Preferred Stock representing 7.7 million Akamai common shares on an as-converted basis, or up to approximately 5% of Akamai's common stock outstanding, at an exercise price of $111.33 per share of common stock. In the filing's own numbers that is 387,051 Series B Preferred shares at $2,226.60 each, with every preferred share initially convertible into 20 common shares, or 7,741,020 common shares in all.
Most of it is not Anthropic's to exercise yet. The warrant vests in four tranches: the first, 40% of the shares, on Anthropic's first payment under Project Plan 3, and the three others, 20% each, on every further $3.0 billion of contractual value Anthropic commits. Akamai puts that first step at about 2% of its outstanding common stock, with the remaining 3% tied to the expansion.
Anthropic has signed other unusually shaped contracts this month, including one that puts Accenture evaluators inside Anthropic with Anthropic paying for them. Its stock market listing has separately been reported as moving to November so it can show third-quarter numbers first.
Akamai is pre-buying memory to serve it
Akamai puts total capital expenditure related to the $11.6 billion commitment at approximately $5.5 billion, and says it will raise 2026 capital expenditure by about $1.7 billion "to secure and pre-purchase critical supply chain components, including memory". It anticipates no impact on its 2026 revenue guidance.
"Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai's capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale," said Dr. Tom Leighton, co-founder and CEO of Akamai. Anthropic is not quoted in the release, and neither company says where the capacity sits, how much of it there is, or which of Anthropic's systems will run on it.
