AI
Anthropic Just Took a Piece of Akamai in an 11.6 Billion Dollar Cloud Deal, and Compute Is Now Paid in Equity
Anthropic has agreed to pay Akamai Technologies 11.6 billion dollars for cloud services over seven years, and Akamai answered with something rarer than a discount, equity itself. The cloud company issued Anthropic a warrant that could turn into about 5 percent of Akamai's common stock, roughly 7.7 million shares at 111 dollars and 33 cents each. About 2 percent vests on the commitment announced Thursday; the rest vests as the relationship expands by up to 9 billion dollars more, which would take the potential total near 20 billion. Akamai shares jumped more than 15 percent in extended trading on the news.
The deal underwrites Anthropic's accelerating CPU workloads on Akamai Cloud's distributed infrastructure, the seven year commitment sitting on top of more than 2.8 billion dollars in multi year cloud agreements Akamai disclosed earlier this year. For context, Anthropic also agreed last month to spend 45 billion dollars renting AI compute from Nscale's West Virginia campus, according to Reuters. The lab is stockpiling compute the way oil states stockpile reserves, and cloud vendors are competing to be the silo.
Here is the angle worth sitting with. Akamai estimates 5.5 billion dollars in capital expenditure to serve the commitment, which means it is building factories for a single customer and handing that customer a slice of the factory. That is a new phase in the cloud wars, where vendors pay for demand lock in with equity and labs pay for supply lock in with long commitments. Akamai chief executive Tom Leighton said the company is thrilled Anthropic chose its capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale. Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne called the potential stake a vote of confidence in the durability of AI driven cloud demand, noting that infrastructure investment keeps expanding to support increasingly compute intensive agentic workloads.
The structure also tells you who holds the leverage. Anthropic's warrant grows as its spending grows, which turns the customer into a part owner and aligns both sides for the long haul. Every additional 3 billion dollars of cloud purchases vests another slice of stock. Compute has become the strategic currency of the decade, and the deals are starting to be priced in it.
For readers, the signal is structural. When cloud vendors start paying customers in stock, the winners will be the companies that secured their megawatts early, and everyone else rents at their price. Watch for more equity sweetened infrastructure deals; this one just set the template.
Quick answers
What is this story about?
Anthropic has agreed to pay Akamai Technologies 11.6 billion dollars for cloud services over seven years, and Akamai answered with something rarer than a discount, equity itself. The cloud company issued Anthropic a warrant that could turn into about 5 percent of Akamai's common stock, roughly 7.7 million shares at 111 dollars and 33 cents each. About 2 percent vests on the commitment announced Thursday; the rest vests as the relationship expands by up to 9 billion dollars more, which would take the potential total near 20 billion. Akamai shares jumped more than 15 percent in extended trading on the news.
Why does this story matter?
For readers, the signal is structural. When cloud vendors start paying customers in stock, the winners will be the companies that secured their megawatts early, and everyone else rents at their price. Watch for more equity sweetened infrastructure deals; this one just set the template.
Sources
- Reuters: Akamai, Anthropic sign $11.6 billion cloud services deal
- GlobeNewswire: Akamai announces $11.6 billion multi year agreement with Anthropic
- TradingView: Akamai secures Anthropic deal, adds Lenovo pact and Jabil build
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