Akamai Signs $1.8 Billion Seven-Year Cloud Deal With Anthropic

Akamai Technologies disclosed in its first-quarter 2026 earnings that a leading United States-based frontier artificial intelligence model provider committed $1.8 billion over seven years to its Cloud Infrastructure Services. Bloomberg reported that the customer is Anthropic.

Both companies declined to comment on the identification. The seven-year agreement averages roughly $257 million per year. Akamai's full-year 2026 revenue guidance midpoint is $4.5 billion, meaning the contract at full ramp would represent close to 6 percent of annual revenue.

The deal follows a $200 million Cloud Infrastructure Services agreement signed in February with another United States technology company. Akamai chief executive Tom Leighton said on the earnings call that the contract is the largest in company history.

The company's Cloud Infrastructure Services revenue grew 40 percent year-over-year to $95 million in the first quarter.

Akamai began its shift toward cloud infrastructure with the $900 million acquisition of Linode in 2022. Linode is a developer-focused infrastructure-as-a-service provider founded in 2003. The combination was intended to create a distributed cloud platform using Akamai's edge network of more than 4,200 points of presence in over 130 countries.

In March 2025, Akamai launched Akamai Cloud Inference, a service that places artificial intelligence inference closer to end users on its existing network and integrates with Nvidia AI Enterprise. In October 2025, the company expanded that with Akamai Inference Cloud, built on Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell servers and BlueField-3 data processing units.

Both services focus on inference rather than training.

The Akamai contract follows several other compute-related moves by Anthropic. On May 6, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei said at the Code with Claude conference that the company grew 80 times year-over-year on an annualized basis in the first quarter, compared with an internal plan of 10 times.

Its annualized revenue run rate has crossed $30 billion. Hours earlier, Anthropic announced a deal with SpaceX to take all available compute capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, including more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and over 300 megawatts.

The Information reported on May 5 that Anthropic reached a five-year, roughly $200 billion commitment with Google Cloud. Anthropic also maintains commitments with AWS, CoreWeave, Nvidia and Broadcom. The Akamai agreement addresses inference workloads that benefit from low-latency delivery near users across multiple geographies.

Training of frontier models remains concentrated in centralized data centers with large clusters of tightly coupled GPUs.

Technology buyers have typically planned artificial intelligence capacity around three primary hyperscalers. The deal indicates that frontier artificial intelligence labs are assembling portfolios of compute suppliers rather than selecting a single cloud provider.

OpenAI has similarly spread its footprint across multiple suppliers including Microsoft, Oracle and CoreWeave. Enterprises using applications that call models through an application programming interface may find that inference performance depends on the model provider's routing across its full set of suppliers.

Akamai's forward-looking statements note standard risks for large contracts, including the customer's ability to meet purchase obligations and the company's ability to deploy infrastructure on schedule. Akamai's installed base of distributed locations provides an advantage for inference but its overall compute capacity remains smaller than that of major hyperscalers.

The company said the contract is a commitment and not yet realized revenue.