Shares opened up about 14% on a seven-year commitment worth roughly two-thirds of the company's market value, then faded to about 6% as investors weighed the spending, the warrant and the timing of revenue.
Akamai Technologies told investors on Thursday evening that Anthropic had committed $11.6 billion over seven years to run computing workloads on its cloud. In the same release, it said it would spend about $5.5 billion to support the deal and that its 2026 revenue outlook would not change.
The opening move was consistent with the headline. Akamai shares, which closed Thursday at $110.41, opened Friday near $125.40, a gain of about 13.6%, and reached $128.46. By about 2:15 p.m., they were at $117.25, up 6.2%. The S&P 500 was up about 0.5%.
The terms
The commitment covers CPU workloads, the general-purpose processing that AI systems use alongside specialized chips, on Akamai Cloud. The release says the relationship could expand by up to another $9 billion, for a total potential commitment of about $20 billion. Only the $11.6 billion is contractual.
Akamai also issued Anthropic a warrant to buy non-voting convertible preferred stock equal to 7.7 million common shares, or up to about 5% of Akamai's outstanding stock, at $111.33 a share. About 2% is expected to vest with the current commitment. The remaining 3% vests only if Anthropic expands its spending, at roughly 1% for each additional $3 billion of cloud services.
"Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and we are thrilled they chose Akamai's capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale," said Tom Leighton, Akamai's co-founder and chief executive.
The spending
Akamai estimates total capital expenditures tied to the commitment at about $5.5 billion, and it expects to raise 2026 capex by about $1.7 billion to pre-purchase supply-chain components, including memory. It anticipates no impact on 2026 revenue guidance.
Put those figures side by side and the shape of the deal is clear. Averaged across seven years, the commitment works out to about $1.66 billion a year. The capex estimate equals about 47% of the contract value, and a large piece of it lands this year, before the revenue does. The deal also adds to more than $2.8 billion of multiyear Cloud Infrastructure Services commitments Akamai announced earlier in 2026, which means Anthropic's contract is several times larger than everything else the company has signed in that business this year combined.
The warrant's strike price, $111.33, sits about $5.92 below where the stock traded Friday afternoon. The portion expected to vest now is already in the money.
The analyst response
Several brokers raised their targets on Friday. Piper Sandler lifted its target to $158 from $125 and kept an overweight rating. BofA raised its target to $185 from $175 with a buy rating. JPMorgan moved to $167 from $158 but kept a neutral rating, and TD Cowen went to $149 from $140 with a hold. Evercore ISI reiterated an outperform rating and a $175 target, arguing that CPU workloads carry better economics than GPU workloads. BofA separately raised its target on AMD, citing the deal as evidence of demand for CPUs in AI.
Competitors did not share in the move. Cloudflare was down about 2.2% and Fastly about 5.9% on Friday afternoon.
Two readings
One view is that a contractual, seven-year commitment from a leading AI developer turns Akamai from a mature content-delivery and security business into an AI infrastructure grower, and that a 2% warrant is a modest price for a customer with a built-in incentive to spend more. The other is that the company is committing billions in capex and granting equity ahead of revenue, with a single customer now dominating its fastest-growing segment.
Akamai's next earnings report is the first place investors will see how the capex is funded, how quickly the contract turns into revenue and what margins it carries. Any filing of the agreement or warrant, and any use of the $9 billion expansion option, would add detail the release did not include.