Anthropic has agreed to spend $11.6 billion on cloud services from Akamai Technologies over seven years as the Claude developer secures more computing capacity for its growing AI workloads.
The agreement could expand by as much as another $9 billion, bringing Anthropic's total potential commitment to about $20 billion, Akamai said Thursday.
The deal will support AI workloads that run on central processing units, or CPUs, with Akamai saying Anthropic will use its distributed cloud infrastructure and software.
"Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale,” said Tom Leighton, co-founder and CEO of Akamai.
Akamai shares rose more than 21% to $134 in after-hours trading on Thursday following the announcement, after closing the regular session 6.8% lower at $110.41.
Anthropic could acquire up to 5% of Akamai
As part of the agreement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant to buy non-voting convertible preferred stock. If fully exercised, it would convert into 7.7 million common shares, representing about 5% of Akamai's currently outstanding stock.
The warrant has an exercise price of $111.33 per common share.
A portion representing about 2% of Akamai's outstanding shares is expected to vest in connection with the initial $11.6 billion commitment. The remaining 3% is tied to an expansion of the agreement.
About 1% will vest for each additional $3 billion of cloud services Anthropic purchases under mutually agreed terms, up to the additional $9 billion.
Akamai plans $5.5 billion in spending
Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion on infrastructure related to the initial agreement.
That includes an additional $1.7 billion in capital expenditure during this year to secure and pre-purchase equipment, including memory. The company said the agreement will not change its revenue guidance for this year.
The Anthropic contract adds to more than $2.8 billion in other multi-year cloud infrastructure commitments that Akamai announced earlier this year.
Anthropic secures more computing capacity
The Akamai agreement adds to a series of large infrastructure commitments by Anthropic. In August, the company agreed to spend $45 billion over six years to rent computing capacity from Nvidia-backed cloud provider Nscale at a planned data center campus in West Virginia.
Days later, Anthropic signed a $35 billion cloud agreement with another Nvidia-backed provider, Lambda, for capacity at a Texas data center. Anthropic also has major computing relationships with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.