Anthropic acquires Akamai’s cloud services and, as a bonus, took up to 5% of Akamai’s shares
Last Friday everyone was watching Microsoft Copilot and the Strait of Hormuz—this one got pushed down
After reading the contract details, I think it has more substance than the day’s market chatter
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$11.6 billion, seven-year term
Akamai issued Anthropic warrants to buy shares, with an exercise price of $111.33, corresponding to about 7.7 million shares
▪️2% unlocks upon the first $11.6 billion commitment
▪️The remaining 3% is tied to follow-on add-ons—unlock about 1% for every additional $3.0 billion committed
▪️The agreement also leaves $9.0 billion of expansion room—if fully utilized, the total deal size approaches $20 billion
In the past: the buyer paid, the seller delivered
Now: Anthropic trades future procurement volumes for supplier equity, tying its compute cost to Akamai’s share price
This is the first time Akamai has included share warrants in a cloud contract
Using equity dilution to secure a long-term order—Akamai knows exactly the weight of this deal.
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One more point that was glossed over: the deal is mainly for CPU cloud services, not GPU training clusters
In the past couple of years, AI infrastructure spending and attention were almost entirely bet on Nvidia and HBM
Anthropic is handing general-purpose compute to Akamai, a company with roots in CDNs; inference and agent workloads are already being shifted toward the CPU side
If this line works, the upside beneficiaries of AI infrastructure are far broader than simply buying Nvidia
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You’ve got to see the timing of the money
First, Akamai has to spend about $5.5 billion in capital expenditures; then this year it will add another $1.7 billion to pre-lock memory and other components
Revenue won’t start coming in until the second half of 2027. In the same year, it’s expected to be $0.15 to $0.30 billion; by the end of 2028 it climbs to $1.7 billion annualized
> The contract isn’t locked in stone
If delivery milestones aren’t met, both parties can walk away
> Whether the warrants can be fully exercised depends on whether follow-on commitments really add up to $20 billion
> Capacity is front-loaded; if demand slows, that becomes a burden
> The potential 5% dilution isn’t free for existing shareholders either
The stock price can run up first
Cash-out happens two years later
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I remember this isn’t mainly because of how Akamai moved that day
The party that controls long-term compute demand can now write procurement contracts into something close to an equity arrangement
Going forward, the key to watch is whether structures like “orders in exchange for equity” become increasingly common in AI infrastructure deals
The above is based on publicly available information; data should be confirmed with official disclosures from the parties involved. DYOR.
#Anthropic