Akamai's $11.6 Billion Plot Twist: A Brutal Sell-Off, Then a 17% After-Hours Pop

Akamai Technologies (AKAM) surged after hours Wednesday after announcing a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud deal with Anthropic — a reversal from a rough regular session that had already sent the stock down nearly 7% before the news broke. The agreement marks a dramatic expansion from the $1.8 billion, seven-year cloud partnership the two companies first struck back in May, and Akamai says it's the largest deal in the company's history.

The deal: $11.6 billion, with room to grow to $20 billion

Anthropic committed $11.6 billion over seven years to use Akamai Cloud for its growing CPU workloads, with the agreement structured to allow potential expansion of up to another $9 billion on top of that base commitment — bringing the total potential value of the contract to roughly $20 billion over its term. It's a major vote of confidence in Akamai's cloud infrastructure from one of the largest AI labs, and a deal size that dwarfs Akamai's current $17.02 billion market cap.

Anthropic gets equity upside too

As part of the arrangement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant covering up to roughly 7.7 million shares — about 5% of common stock outstanding — structured as non-voting convertible Series B Preferred Stock with an exercise price of $111.33 per share. Vesting is tiered to the size of the relationship: about 2% of common stock vests immediately alongside the baseline $11.6 billion commitment, while the remaining 3% vests conditionally in increments tied to every additional $3 billion of contract expansion. Structuring the deal with an equity warrant aligns Anthropic's incentives with the partnership's success and is an increasingly common feature of large AI-infrastructure agreements, where the customer gets a stake in the provider's upside alongside its own committed spend.

The capex bill: $5.5 billion, with a 2026 head start

Akamai estimates the commitment carries about $5.5 billion in associated capital expenditure, including an expected $1.7 billion increase in 2026 spending specifically to secure and pre-purchase supply-chain components. That upfront 2026 spend suggests Akamai is moving quickly to lock in the hardware and components needed to support Anthropic's workloads well ahead of when the bulk of the revenue will show up.

No change to 2026 guidance — but a real ramp ahead

Despite the size of the deal and the capex commitment tied to it, Akamai said the agreement has no impact on its 2026 revenue guidance — a signal that the financial benefit is weighted toward future years of the seven-year term rather than an immediate, guidance-moving event this year. Akamai has projected Anthropic-specific revenue to reach $150 million to $300 million in 2027, scaling to an annual run rate of roughly $1.7 billion by 2028 — the clearest sign yet of how much of Akamai's growth story is about to hinge on this single relationship.

A CPU-first bet, and a bigger pivot

Strategically, the deal is notable for what it's not: rather than centering on specialized GPUs, Anthropic is leaning on Akamai Cloud's distributed infrastructure to back its surging CPU workload growth at scale. Combined with the earlier $1.8 billion deal, the relationship now cements Akamai's transition from a traditional content-delivery-network and cybersecurity provider into a serious distributed AI-cloud infrastructure player — a repositioning investors have rewarded twice now with sharp single-day stock moves.