Every AI infrastructure deal this year has been a GPU story. This one isn't. Anthropic has committed $11.6 billion over seven years to Akamai Cloud, and the contract covers CPU workloads only, not a single accelerator. Akamai announced it on 24 September after the market closed, filed it with the SEC the same day, and its stock jumped 15% the next morning. We've read the 8-K, the press release and the call coverage. What it buys is the more interesting part, and it's the part nobody's fully explained yet.
The short answer
Anthropic signed a seven-year, $11.6 billion commitment with Akamai for cloud infrastructure that runs CPU workloads, per Akamai's 8-K of 24 September 2026. Options can add about $9 billion more, for roughly $20 billion in total. Akamai gave Anthropic a warrant on up to about 5% of its stock at $111.33 a share, vesting as spending grows. Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion in capex first, sees no revenue from it in 2026, $150 million to $300 million in 2027, and a run rate near $1.7 billion a year from the end of 2028. Neither company has said exactly which Anthropic workloads will run there.
What $11.6 billion of CPUs actually means
The 8-K's wording is careful. The commitment is for cloud infrastructure services to support Anthropic's "accelerating CPU workload demands" on Akamai Cloud, which is the old Linode platform grown up, spread over Akamai's points of presence. Per BankInfoSecurity's account of the call, the deal's "entirely CPU-based", while Akamai's wider book with Anthropic mixes CPU and GPU. Akamai says it signed $2.8 billion of multi-year cloud commitments earlier in 2026, and Bloomberg reported a $1.8 billion Anthropic deal back in May. So this is the third step up, not a first date.
Why CPUs? Nobody's said, officially. Our guess, and it's only a guess: agents. A model that writes code, runs it, opens a browser and calls tools spends a lot of wall-clock time in sandboxes, and a sandbox is a plain VM or container. It needs cores and RAM. It doesn't need an H-class accelerator sitting idle while a test suite runs. Akamai's own roadmap in the release lists agent sandboxing, which fits. We might be wrong, though. Batch data prep and evaluation harnesses are CPU-hungry too, and Anthropic hasn't commented beyond the release.
The power side's small by AI standards. Akamai says its signed cloud contracts, all of them, need about 95 to 105 MW. The Nscale deal we covered in August was 460 MW on its own. CFO Ed McGowan's pitch is that CPU work earns more per megawatt, and Akamai puts its portfolio at roughly $22 million of annual revenue per MW. That's a very different business from renting GPUs by the hour.
The warrant, the capex and the exit door
Here's the part that makes this unusual for Akamai. It's the first time it has attached a warrant to a cloud contract. Anthropic gets the right to buy non-voting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares, about 5% of the company, at $111.33 each. About 2% vests with the $11.6 billion commitment. The other 3% vests roughly 1% at a time, for each extra $3 billion of services Anthropic signs. Three extra tranches, $9 billion, and you land at about $20 billion in total.
Some quick arithmetic of our own. Akamai traded at $127.49 the morning after, per 24/7 Wall St. The first 2% is around 3.1 million shares, about $16 each in the money, so roughly $50 million on paper. It reads as a sweetener, not a strategy.
The capex is where we'd look harder. Akamai expects about $5.5 billion to serve the firm commitment, including roughly $1.7 billion added to 2026 for components and memory bought ahead. It isn't building its own data centres; it's leasing colocation space. Revenue doesn't start until the second half of 2027. And TechCrunch notes the deal depends on Akamai hitting delivery and availability requirements, with either side able to walk away under certain conditions. Those conditions aren't public. For a company whose pre-deal market value was $15.87 billion, that's a lot of money spent against terms we can't read.
Who should care, and what we'd watch
If you run workloads on Akamai Cloud today, the practical question is capacity. A single tenant absorbing tens of megawatts of new CPU build-out could either make the platform better funded or make regions tighter for everyone else during 2027. Akamai hasn't said which regions the build goes into, so we can't tell you yet.
If you're sizing agent infrastructure yourself, the signal's clearer. A frontier lab just priced seven years of general-purpose compute at the scale of a small cloud. It matches how agent loops behave: the model call's often a fraction of the elapsed time, and the rest is shells and builds. Honestly, I'd stop budgeting agent projects as pure token spend. The accelerator race gets the headlines, but CPU hours are the line that grows quietly.
What we don't know is still long. No region list, no instance types, no exit terms, and no word from Anthropic on what runs where. If Akamai's next quarterly filing adds detail, we'll update this page.
Sources
Akamai, Akamai Announces $11.6 Billion Multi-year Agreement with Anthropic, 24 September 2026, and the Form 8-K exhibit 99.1 (commitment, options, warrant terms, $5.5B and $1.7B capex, no 2026 revenue impact). TechCrunch, Anthropic to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years in cloud deal, 25 September 2026 (CPU focus, exit conditions, the May $1.8B report, first warrant on a cloud deal). BankInfoSecurity, 7-Year, $11.6B Anthropic Deal Drives Akamai Cloud Buildout, September 2026 (95 to 105 MW, $22M per MW, colocation, revenue timeline). 24/7 Wall St., Akamai surges 15% on $11.6B Anthropic cloud deal, 25 September 2026 (share price, $15.87B market value).
Frequently asked questions
Does the Akamai deal give Anthropic GPUs?
No. Akamai's filing ties the $11.6 billion commitment to Anthropic's CPU workloads, and coverage of the call describes it as entirely CPU-based. Akamai's other business with Anthropic includes GPU capacity, but this contract doesn't.
How big can the deal get?
About $20 billion. The firm commitment is $11.6 billion over seven years, and Anthropic can add roughly $9 billion more in $3 billion steps, each vesting about another 1% of the warrant.
Is Anthropic becoming an Akamai shareholder?
Potentially, up to about 5%. The warrant covers non-voting preferred stock convertible into 7.7 million common shares at $111.33, and it vests as Anthropic's spending rises, about 2% at the start.
When does the capacity come online?
Akamai expects revenue from the second half of 2027, $150 million to $300 million that year, and a run rate near $1.7 billion from the end of 2028. It hasn't named regions or dates for specific sites.
