Anthropic signs $11.6 billion Akamai cloud deal

Anthropic's new agreement with Akamai Technologies is the latest in a rapid sequence of compute commitments. Just last month, the company committed $45 billion in compute capacity from Nscale. In total, Anthropic has reportedly closed compute deals worth $517 billion over eleven months — a scale that raises the question of whether such spending can be sustained.

The deal's structure is notable: Akamai receives a warrant for up to 5 percent of its stock, with 2 percent tied to the current contract and another 3 percent contingent on the deal expanding by up to $9 billion. That gives Akamai a direct stake in Anthropic's future purchasing decisions. Akamai's stock jumped 22 percent after hours, and the company expects capital costs of about $5.5 billion and an extra $1.7 billion in spending before the end of 2026.

The open question is whether this pace is sustainable. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are locking in capacity based on projected future revenue. CEO Dario Amodei warned in December 2025 that Anthropic could go bankrupt if its estimates were off by even a small margin, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently urged caution about unsustainable spending on compute buildouts. The outcome may hinge on whether Anthropic's revenue growth matches the capacity it is committing to.