Every technological gold rush needs a seller of shovels. In the artificial-intelligence boom the pick-and-pan merchants have mostly been chipmakers and hyperscale cloud firms. Now a survivor of an earlier mining craze wants a slice. Akamai Technologies, the Cambridge, Massachusetts firm that made its name speeding up web pages in the dot-com era, announced on September 24th an $11.6bn deal to supply cloud services to Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, over the next seven years. It is the largest contract in Akamai’s history, according to Tom Leighton, its chief executive.
The announcement expands a partnership the two companies already had. In May Akamai’s share price soared after it disclosed a $1.8bn agreement with what it would only describe as a ‘leading frontier model provider’. Neither side would confirm the customer’s identity at the time, but filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s markets regulator, show the two signed that agreement on May 5th. The new deal enlarges the relationship to $11.6bn, with the possibility of a further $9bn in revenue commitments that would bring the total to roughly $20bn, said Ed McGowan, Akamai’s chief financial officer.
Mr Leighton casts the tie-up as a changing of the technological guard. The deal, he said on a conference call, positions Akamai to be ‘the infrastructure provider for the next generation of AI powered applications.’ He added: ‘We are building upon our global footprint and years of experience in serving the world’s largest enterprises to enable and secure responsible AI.’ The customers using Akamai’s cloud, he noted, are running a growing share of AI-driven work: customer-service voice agents, translation services, speech recognition for subtitles, robotics and simulation renderings.
Investors greeted the news warmly, if without the rapture of May. Then, Akamai’s stock traded at $160 before its pop. This week it rose to a high of $135 after the announcement-useful, but a reminder of how far expectations had already run ahead of results. The restraint is easier to understand when the cash flows are examined. Akamai will spend $5.5bn over the next two years to support the contract and does not expect to book any revenue from it in 2026. Earnings of between $150m and $300m are anticipated in the second half of 2027, Mr McGowan said, rising through 2028, after which the company estimates the deal will yield about $1.7bn in revenue each year.
The deal also binds the two companies’ fortunes together. Akamai has issued a warrant giving Anthropic the right to buy 7.7m of its shares-roughly a 5% stake. That is an unusual sweetener for a supplier to hand a customer, and it speaks to the bargaining power of frontier-model labs, whose appetite for computing is vast enough to make or remake infrastructure providers. For Anthropic, locking in capacity from a firm with a globe-spanning network of servers is a hedge against the industry’s scramble for data-centre supply; for Akamai, the arrangement confers a marquee client at a moment when being seen as serious about AI is itself a commercial asset.
The wager cuts both ways. Akamai is committing $5.5bn of capital before it has earned a dollar from the arrangement, on the premise that Anthropic’s growth-and that of AI applications more broadly-will fill that capacity with profitable work. Should demand falter, the spending will not. Should it hold, a firm once synonymous with cached web pages may end up as one of the quieter winners of the artificial-intelligence age. The dot-com era produced few survivors that rebuilt themselves so thoroughly. Mr Leighton is plainly betting the second act will be bigger than the first.