Anthropic has signed an $11.6 billion, seven-year contract with Akamai Technologies for computing power, adding to the AI developer's growing list of data-center deals, according to Bloomberg. Akamai will supply access to central processing units — generalist chips seeing renewed data-center demand as they help support AI services — and has issued a warrant giving Anthropic the right to buy Series B shares at $111.33 each, converting into 7.7 million common shares. The agreement builds on a $1.8 billion computing deal the two struck earlier this year. Demand for Anthropic's Claude software has soared as customers flock to it for coding and other tasks, and the company has been on a buying spree, tapping firms from Alphabet's Google to Elon Musk's SpaceX for chip access.

Akamai, which earns most of its sales from content delivery and cybersecurity, has been rapidly expanding into computing in search of growth. The Anthropic contract is the largest in its history, and it estimated related capital spending will total about $5.5 billion — more than six times what it spent in all of 2025. Akamai shares jumped 17% in late trading Thursday to $129.60 around 4:10 p.m. New York time. CEO Tom Leighton said the cloud business is "growing obviously extremely fast" and that cloud-contract revenue could eclipse its other segments "fairly soon," adding, "We're not looking necessarily at a long time frame for that to happen."

Akamai said part of the warrant — about 2% of its common stock — vests with the computing agreement, expected to begin in the second half of next year, with the rest coming available over the seven-year term. It is the first time Akamai has agreed to such a warrant in a cloud deal, a step Leighton called serious but sensible because "it helps bring the companies together." The deal comes as some Wall Street investors flag "circular" AI arrangements, in which cloud, hardware and AI companies buy each other's products while also investing in one another, making real demand harder to gauge. Akamai expects about $150 million to $300 million in Anthropic revenue next year, rising to an annual run rate of about $1.7 billion by 2028, with most of the capex — largely servers, chips and networking gear — occurring next year. Leighton acknowledged a "big step up in capex" but said returns are strong and the company is discussing more business with "all the major players," including hyperscalers and big enterprises.