Akamai Technologies just landed one of the biggest AI infrastructure contracts of the year — and Wall Street noticed immediately. Shares jumped as much as 20% in after-hours trading Thursday after the company announced an $11.6 billion seven-year contract with artificial intelligence giant Anthropic.
The agreement will support Anthropic’s CPU workload requirements through Akamai Cloud’s distributed AI infrastructure and software. It builds on momentum Akamai already had this year — the new commitment adds to more than $2.8 billion in multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services commitments the company had previously announced.
The most interesting part of this deal isn’t just the dollar figure — it’s the structure. Instead of a straightforward services contract, Akamai issued a warrant to Anthropic for the purchase of non-voting convertible Series B Preferred Stock representing 7.7 million shares of Akamai’s common stock on an as-converted basis — up to approximately 5% of the company’s outstanding common stock, at an exercise price of $111.33 per share.
That equity doesn’t vest all at once. About 2% of Akamai’s common stock outstanding is expected to vest in connection with the $11.6 billion commitment announced Thursday, while the remaining approximately 3% would vest through the successful expansion of the commitment up to an additional $9 billion within the seven-year term of the warrant. The incentive structure is tiered: each additional $3 billion purchase of cloud services will result in the vesting of approximately 1% of Akamai’s common stock outstanding. In plain terms — the more compute Anthropic buys, the more of Akamai it can end up owning. It aligns both companies’ incentives: Anthropic gets a discount-like mechanism tied to usage, and Akamai locks in a customer that’s motivated to keep scaling with them rather than shop around.
Akamai co-founder and CEO Dr. Tom Leighton framed it as validation of the company’s infrastructure push, saying he was pleased Anthropic chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale.
On the cost side, total capital expenditures related to the $11.6 billion commitment are estimated to be approximately $5.5 billion. Akamai says the deal won’t disrupt this year’s numbers — the company expects no impact to its 2026 revenue guidance — but it will front-load spending: an increase of approximately $1.7 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 to secure and pre-purchase critical supply chain components, including memory.
This is another data point in the broader trend of AI labs locking in long-term infrastructure capacity years in advance — and paying for it partly in equity, which ties the infrastructure providers’ stock performance directly to AI demand. For a company like Akamai, historically known more for content delivery than AI compute, this deal is a signal that it’s repositioning itself as a serious player in AI infrastructure — and the market rewarded that repositioning instantly with a 20% pop.
