Akamai signs $11.6 billion cloud deal with Anthropic, grants warrant for up to 5% stake

By Harshita Mary Varghese

Sept ‌24 (Reuters) - Akamai Technologies ​signed ​an $11.6 billion cloud services deal with Anthropic on Thursday, and issued a warrant that could give the AI lab up to ‌5% stake in the cloud company, sending its shares surging 22% ⁠in extended trading.

The agreement secures a long-term commitment from one of the fastest-growing AI ‌companies, and adds to more ‌than $2.8 billion in multi-year cloud infrastructure deals Akamai announced across its customer base this year.

Under the seven-year contract, the warrant would give Anthropic the ​right to purchase Series B shares at $111.33 each that converts into about 7.7 million shares of Akamai's common stock.

IPO-bound Anthropic has been aggressively ⁠expanding its computing power and securing the infrastructure needed to train and run increasingly powerful models, driving ​multibillion-dollar deals with cloud and data-center providers.

It agreed to spend $45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale's West ​Virginia data center campus, Reuters reported last ‌month.

"Despite growing concerns about potential adverse consequences of agentic AI, infrastructure investment will continue to expand to support increasingly compute-intensive ⁠agentic workloads," said Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne.

The potential stake "can be seen as a vote of confidence in the durability of AI-driven cloud demand."

A portion of the warrant ⁠representing about 2% of Akamai's common stock outstanding is tied to Anthropic's $11.6 billion commitment, while ​the remaining 3% would vest if the companies expand the agreement by up to another $9 billion.

Akamai said the total capital expenditure related to the initial commitment is estimated ‌to be about $5.5 billion.

The company expects no impact to its annual revenue forecast, and an increase of about $1.7 billion ‌in its 2026 capital spending to secure and pre-purchase components needed to support ⁠the agreement, including memory.

Separately, Akamai authorized ‌electronics firm Jabil to ​purchase about $1.7 billion worth of memory components under an existing services agreement.

(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; Editing by ‌Shilpi Majumdar)

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