By Harshita Mary Varghese
Sept 24 (Reuters) – Akamai Technologies signed an $11.6 billion cloud services deal with Anthropic on Thursday, and issued a warrant that could give the AI lab up to 5% stake in the cloud company, sending its shares surging 22% in extended trading.
The agreement secures a long-term commitment from one of the fastest-growing AI companies, and adds to more than $2.8 billion in multi-year cloud infrastructure deals Akamai announced across its customer base this year.
Under the seven-year contract, the warrant would give Anthropic the right to purchase Series B shares at $111.33 each that converts into about 7.7 million shares of Akamai’s common stock.
IPO-bound Anthropic has been aggressively expanding its computing power and securing the infrastructure needed to train and run increasingly powerful models, driving multibillion-dollar deals with cloud and data-center providers.
It agreed to spend $45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale’s West Virginia data center campus, Reuters reported last month.
“Despite growing concerns about potential adverse consequences of agentic AI, infrastructure investment will continue to expand to support increasingly compute-intensive agentic workloads,” said Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne.
The potential stake “can be seen as a vote of confidence in the durability of AI-driven cloud demand.”
A portion of the warrant representing about 2% of Akamai’s common stock outstanding is tied to Anthropic’s $11.6 billion commitment, while the remaining 3% would vest if the companies expand the agreement by up to another $9 billion.
Akamai said the total capital expenditure related to the initial commitment is estimated to be about $5.5 billion.
The company expects no impact to its annual revenue forecast, and an increase of about $1.7 billion in its 2026 capital spending to secure and pre-purchase components needed to support the agreement, including memory.
Separately, Akamai authorized electronics firm Jabil to purchase about $1.7 billion worth of memory components under an existing services agreement.
(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
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