AI company Anthropic has agreed to lease compute capacity from Akamai in a seven-year deal valued at $11.6 billion, with a potential expansion clause that could bring the total commitment to approximately $20 billion. Anthropic will use Akamai Cloud's distributed infrastructure and software to support its CPU workloads. Total capital expenditures related to the deal are estimated at approximately $5.5 billion, including roughly $1.7 billion in additional 2026 spending to pre-purchase supply chain components such as memory. Akamai also issued Anthropic a warrant for up to approximately five percent of its common stock, with vesting tied to the expansion of the agreement.
At $11.6 billion, this is one of the largest single compute infrastructure contracts announced in the AI sector, establishing Akamai as a major provider for frontier AI workloads and validating distributed cloud infrastructure as a serious alternative to hyperscaler deployments. The deal also adds to more than $2.8 billion in multi-year cloud commitments Akamai has secured in 2025, signaling a broader shift in how AI companies are sourcing large-scale compute capacity.
An $11.6 billion compute contract between a major CDN/cloud provider and a leading AI lab is one of the largest AI infrastructure deals reported today, signaling the scale of enterprise commitments to AI workloads.