Anthropic just tied its cloud bill to Akamai's stock price.
Anthropic signed an $11.6 billion, seven-year deal to run on Akamai's cloud infrastructure, Akamai announced after the US market closed on September 24, 2026. The agreement can grow by another $9 billion, pushing the total value toward $20 billion over its life. As part of the deal, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for 7.7 million shares on an as-converted basis, equal to about 5% of the company.
That's an unusual arrangement: instead of just paying for compute, Anthropic now has a financial stake in its own cloud provider's success. For Akamai, better known for content delivery and edge computing than AI infrastructure, landing a marquee AI tenant is a signal it wants a bigger seat at the table alongside AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Handing a customer equity to secure a deal is one way to guarantee loyalty, or it's a sign of how hard the cloud infrastructure market is fighting for AI workloads right now.