Akamai’s biggest contract ever runs in an unusual direction. The company is not simply selling cloud capacity to Anthropic; it handed the lab a stake that grows the more the lab spends.
The headline figure is $11.6B over seven years, disclosed in a Thursday filing. That dwarfs a $1.8B arrangement between the two firms reported in May. Nothing is guaranteed: the money depends on Akamai hitting delivery and service-availability targets, and the escape clauses run both ways.
Revenue arrives slowly. Executives guided investors Thursday to $150M to $300M next year, all of it in the second half.
By the end of 2028 the contract should run at roughly $1.7B a year. Getting there costs Akamai about $5.5B in buildout, plus another $1.7B added to this year’s capital budget for parts such as memory.
Then there is the equity. Akamai issued a warrant for nonvoting preferred stock. It converts into 7.7M common shares at $111.33 apiece. That is about 5 percent of the shares outstanding.
About 2 percent vests on the first payment. Each further $3B Anthropic commits unlocks roughly another percentage point. Fully exercised, the arrangement could reach $20B.
The structure inverts the circular script, where chipmakers and cloud providers buy into the labs that buy from them. AMD used a similar warrant with OpenAI last year.
Investors liked it. Akamai shares rose as much as 17 percent after hours. The contract also spotlights CPUs, the general-purpose silicon agents lean on for running code and browsing the web.
