Anthropic has committed $11.6 billion over seven years to Akamai Technologies for cloud infrastructure services, according to a filing released Thursday. The agreement represents more than six times the value of a $1.8 billion arrangement previously reported by Bloomberg in May. Akamai's securities filing indicates the deal is contingent on meeting specific service-delivery and availability targets, with either party retaining the right to terminate under defined conditions.

The arrangement marks Akamai's largest in company history and reflects Anthropic's growing demand for foundational computing capacity. While the partnership emphasizes central processing unit (CPU) resources — general-purpose chips used for running applications and hosting web services — Akamai has not specified the exact workloads Anthropic will deploy. Executives noted on an investor call that revenue recognition from the deal will begin in the second half of 2027, with projected earnings of $150 million to $300 million that year, scaling to approximately $1.7 billion annually by the end of 2028.

To support the expanded infrastructure, Akamai plans to invest roughly $5.5 billion in capacity development and has increased its current-year capital expenditure budget by $1.7 billion to pre-acquire components such as memory modules. As part of the agreement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant granting the right to purchase up to 7.7 million shares of nonvoting preferred stock at $111.33 per share, potentially converting to about 5% of outstanding common shares. Approximately 2% of the warrant is expected to vest upon the first payment, with additional tranches tied to subsequent spending milestones — each $3 billion increment unlocking about 1% more equity, with a theoretical maximum expansion of $9 billion.

This structure diverges from typical AI infrastructure partnerships, where suppliers often take equity stakes in AI developers. Instead, Akamai's warrant functions as an incentive tied to customer spending growth. The model parallels a similar arrangement AMD executed with OpenAI in 2023, linking chip procurement milestones to equity rights. Anthropic has previously engaged in comparable investments with major cloud providers and chipmakers, though CEO Dario Amodei stated in a December interview with The New York Times that the company does not pursue such arrangements at the scale of its peers.

Akamai's stock rose as much as 17% in after-hours trading following the announcement, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company also noted that it may earn a commission on links in its publications, though this does not influence editorial content. Aditya Mehta, a TechCrunch reporter covering artificial intelligence, reported this story; he is affiliated with the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism and holds a degree from UC Berkeley. He can be reached at aditya.mehta@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message on Signal.