Akamai Stock Jumps After $11.6 Billion Seven-Year Cloud Deal With Anthropic AI

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Akamai Technologies shares jumped Friday after the company said Anthropic committed $11.6 billion over seven years for cloud computing, with an option to add as much as $9 billion more.

The stock traded around $126.54 in early New York dealing on Sept. 25, up $16.13, or 14.6 percent, from Thursday's close of $110.41. After-hours and premarket prints had been even higher, with Barron's citing a rise of more than 21 percent to $133.84 before the open.

Akamai said the contract will "support Anthropic's accelerating CPU workload demands by leveraging Akamai Cloud's distributed AI infrastructure and software." It adds to more than $2.8 billion in multi-year cloud infrastructure commitments the company has already disclosed this year.

Chief Executive Tom Leighton said: "Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai's capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale."

Anthropic did not immediately comment to Barron's.

As part of the pact, Akamai issued a warrant covering about 7.7 million shares on an as-converted basis, or up to about 5 percent of common stock outstanding. The exercise price is $111.33 a share. About 2 percent of the equity is tied to the initial $11.6 billion commitment; another 3 percent could vest if the companies expand the deal by up to $9 billion, according to summaries of the announcement. That would take the potential commitment near $20 billion.

Building the capacity is expensive. Barron's reported Akamai expects $5.5 billion in new capital spending, including memory purchases, with $1.6 billion of that in 2026. Benzinga cited about $1.7 billion of extra 2026 capital expenditure to lock in supply-chain parts and said the company sees no change to 2026 revenue guidance. An investor-update recap said revenue from the Anthropic work is expected to ramp toward $1.7 billion a year by 2028.

Akamai is best known as a content-delivery network that later pushed into cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure. Delivery revenue has been under pressure. Security is the largest profit engine. Cloud Infrastructure Services is smaller but growing fast. In the second quarter ended June 30, total revenue was $1.1 billion, up 5 percent. Security was $604 million, up 10 percent. Cloud Infrastructure Services was $99 million, up 39 percent. Delivery and other cloud applications fell 6 percent to $396 million.

GAAP diluted earnings were $0.52, down 27 percent. Non-GAAP diluted earnings were $1.59. Cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities were $4.616 billion. The company had guided full-year 2026 revenue to $4.445 billion–$4.530 billion before this announcement and said the new deal does not alter that 2026 top-line range — meaning most of the $11.6 billion sits in later years.

Anthropic, maker of the Claude models, is privately held and filed confidential IPO paperwork in June, Barron's noted. AI labs have been signing multiyear compute contracts with Nvidia-heavy clouds such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and CoreWeave. A large CPU-focused deal with Akamai is a different flavor of capacity: inference and supporting workloads spread across Akamai's edge footprint rather than a single training campus.

Investors repriced Akamai as more than a CDN with a security wrap. The share count implied by the warrant is dilution if Anthropic exercises. The capex is cash out the door before the revenue curve steepens. Those are the offsets. The bid on Friday treated the contract size as the headline.

Akamai's next scheduled earnings date in market calendars was around Nov. 5. Until then, the tape is trading a seven-year number, a warrant at $111.33, and a stock that closed Thursday at $110.41 after a 6.8 percent drop and opened Friday in the mid-$120s.

The company still has to buy memory, stand up servers and keep Anthropic's usage on the committed path. Anthropic still has to need that CPU layer for seven years. Friday's move is the market assigning a higher probability that both happen.