Akamai Shares Jump Up to 26% After-Hours on $11.6 Billion Anthropic Cloud Deal, Handed 5% Stock Warrant

Since federal regulators and states have spent this week fighting over who pays for the power grid strain AI data centers are causing, the private financing side of the AI buildout keeps moving even faster. Akamai Technologies announced Thursday, September 24, that it signed an $11.6 billion, seven-year cloud infrastructure deal with Anthropic, expandable to roughly $20 billion, according to a Globe Newswire release from Akamai.

Akamai shares, which trade on the NASDAQ under AKAM, jumped as much as 26% in extended trading after the announcement, according to TradingView, hitting $129.60 according to figures Bloomberg's Lynn Doan reported. StockTwits and Channel NewsAsia put the after-hours pop closer to 20%. For a company whose annual revenue has historically sat in the low single-digit billions, according to Crypto Briefing, that's a substantial single-day move.

The deal builds on a $1.8 billion contract the two companies signed in May, according to The Next Web. Anthropic will use Akamai's distributed network for CPU workloads as it scales its AI models.

The Warrant: A First for Akamai

What makes this deal unusual isn't just the dollar figure. Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant to buy non-voting convertible Series B Preferred Stock representing 7.7 million shares, or up to about 5% of Akamai's common stock, at an exercise price of $111.33 per share, according to the Globe Newswire release.

Roughly 2% of that stake vests immediately with the $11.6 billion commitment. The remaining 3% vests only if Anthropic expands spending by another $9 billion, at a rate of 1% per additional $3 billion, Akamai said.

CEO Tom Leighton told Bloomberg this is the first time Akamai has agreed to a warrant as part of a cloud deal with any customer. "It's a serious step, but I think in this case it made sense to do," Leighton said. "It helps bring the companies together." The warrant is non-voting, meaning Anthropic gets financial upside if Akamai's stock rises but no boardroom influence, according to Crypto Briefing.

What Akamai Is Spending, and What It Expects Back

Akamai says total capital expenditures tied to the deal will run about $5.5 billion, more than six times what the company spent on capex in all of 2025, according to Bloomberg figures cited by The Next Web. Akamai is raising its 2026 capex guidance by $1.7 billion to pre-buy supplies, including memory, and separately authorized electronics manufacturer Jabil to purchase about $1.7 billion in memory components under an existing services agreement, Channel NewsAsia reported.

Despite the spending surge, Akamai said the deal does not change its 2026 revenue guidance. Leighton told Bloomberg the contract is expected to start in the second half of 2027, with $150 million to $300 million in revenue from Anthropic in the first year, ramping to an annual run rate of about $1.7 billion by 2028.

The Circular Deal Problem

Bloomberg reported that some Wall Street investors have raised concerns about so-called circular AI deals, where companies buying each other's products also take equity stakes in one another, which critics say makes real demand for AI computing harder to measure independently.

Akamai isn't just selling Anthropic cloud capacity. It's also now financially exposed to Anthropic's success through the warrant, and Anthropic's willingness to keep spending determines whether the rest of that stake ever vests. If Anthropic pulls back, Akamai eats a $5.5 billion capex bill built around a contract that may not fully materialize. Akamai's stock move already priced in the upside; nobody's pricing the downside case yet.

On the other hand, Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne told Channel NewsAsia the arrangement "can be seen as a vote of confidence in the durability of AI-driven cloud demand," noting that infrastructure investment keeps expanding despite growing concerns about agentic AI's risks. Both things can be true: real compute demand exists, and the accounting incentives to overstate its durability also exist.

Part of a Bigger Spending Spree

The Akamai deal is one entry in a run of massive compute agreements Anthropic has signed this year. It agreed to a $10 billion deal with Volta in August, and The Information reported Anthropic is the customer behind a $13.7 billion contract with Rum Group, according to The Next Web. Reuters reported last month that Anthropic committed $45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale's West Virginia data center campus. Anthropic has also secured chips from Google, according to Bloomberg, and signed its first Australian data center lease.

Channel NewsAsia described Anthropic as "IPO-bound," aggressively expanding its computing power and securing infrastructure needed to train and run its models. Anthropic was not quoted in Akamai's own announcement of the deal.

Akamai will host a conference call to discuss the deal's mechanics further. The open question, given the string of massive individual compute contracts Anthropic has signed this year across Akamai, Volta, Rum Group, and Nscale, is whether that spending reflects genuine model-training demand or a financing structure where AI companies and their infrastructure vendors are propping up each other's growth numbers. No regulator has opened an inquiry into these arrangements as of this writing.