Akamai Wins an Anthropic Order 2.6 Times Its Annual Revenue

Akamai closed Thursday at $110.41, down 6.78%. The 10-year Treasury yield sat at its highest level since 2007, and tech stocks were under pressure.

An hour after the close, the company announced its deal with Anthropic. The stock rose between 17% and 22% in after-hours trading. Premarket, it was reported up about 21%.

The deal is worth $11.6B. Akamai's revenue guidance for this year is $4.45B to $4.53B.

A single customer placed an order worth 2.6 times the company's annual revenue.

What Is Being Sold Is Not GPUs

The deal covers Anthropic's CPU workloads. That means not model training, but the work that runs around the model.

An AI agent does not just call the model. It runs code, opens files, calls tools and waits for results. Most of that work runs on ordinary server processors, not on GPUs.

We saw this demand priced for the first time in Intel and Arm, after Meta's Muse agent. The Akamai deal is the same demand turned into a supplier contract.

Akamai's cloud infrastructure unit booked $99.3M of revenue in the second quarter. The company had already gathered $2.8B of multi-year commitments this year. SiliconANGLE reported that Bloomberg had identified May's unnamed $1.8B customer as Anthropic.

CEO Tom Leighton's statement was brief:

"we are thrilled they chose Akamai's capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale."

The market read this as a revenue story.

The real story is on the spending side.

Revenue in 2027, Spending This Year

The deal is take-or-pay. Anthropic commits to pay whether or not it uses the capacity. But that capacity has to be built first, and Akamai is the one building it.

The schedule management gave on the call shows the order in which the money moves.

There is no revenue contribution in 2026. The second half of 2027 is expected to bring $150M to $300M. The annual revenue run rate is targeted to reach $1.7B by the end of 2028.

The math says two things. First, revenue over the contract's life is more than twice the investment. Second, this deal pushes Akamai's cash flow sharply negative for the first two years.

Akamai listed its cash, its credit line and operating cash flow as funding sources. It did not rule out raising more capital.

An Equity Right for the Customer

The second part of the deal is a warrant, a right to buy shares at a fixed price. Anthropic can buy preferred stock equal to 7.7 million Akamai shares at $111.33 each.

About 40% of the warrant, roughly 3.1 million shares, vests with the first payment. Each remaining 20% tranche vests with every additional $3B Anthropic buys. The warrant expires in 2033.

When the stock rose to $128.80 after hours, the paper value of the vested 3.1 million shares reached about $54M. The deal itself created that value.

We saw the same structure in the Qualcomm-Amazon deal. A large customer ties its order to a share of the supplier's stock gains.

Who Carries the Risk

According to the 8-K, payments are subject to "satisfaction of delivery and service-availability requirements." Anthropic can terminate for a material breach by Akamai, or if Akamai is sold to a competitor.

So take-or-pay binds the customer, but it also binds Akamai to deliver. If the servers are not built on time, the guaranteed revenue does not arrive on time either.

A day earlier, Oracle's notice to Blue Owl showed the other side of the same risk. If the facility is late, the tenant defers payment and the builder waits.

The drop on deal day was not specific to Akamai; rate pressure hit all of tech. The past month of the Nasdaq 100 shows that backdrop.

For Akamai's own path, the three-month chart:

What Remains

Akamai left its 2026 revenue guidance unchanged; it expects no revenue from the deal this year. If fully ramped, a $1.7B annual run rate would equal about 38% of today's total revenue.

That means the revenue mix of a CDN and security company changes within two years. It also means heavy dependence on a single customer.

This article is based on Akamai's Sept. 24 press release and 8-K filing, the company's second-quarter earnings call, and deal-day reports from SiliconANGLE, Benzinga and Yahoo Finance. The investment and revenue schedule reflects figures management gave on the call. After-hours and premarket prices differ across sources and are given as a range. The warrant value is the author's calculation.