Anthropic's seven-year, $11.6 billion deal with Akamai: CPU capacity, not GPUs
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This English page is a machine translation of the Korean original, so some phrasing may read awkwardly.
Anthropic has signed a seven-year, $11.6 billion deal with Akamai, securing cloud capacity for workloads that run on CPUs rather than GPUs.
Read the original at Akamai press release ↗
It was an $11.6 billion deal, but the word CPU stood out before the price did.
On September 24 (U.S. time), Akamai announced a seven-year deal with Anthropic worth about $11.6 billion. Anthropic will use Akamai Cloud's distributed infrastructure to handle its growing CPU workloads.
AI infrastructure news usually starts with how many GPUs a company has secured. GPUs are chips used mainly for AI model computations. CPUs are general-purpose chips used for tasks like running code or opening web pages.
TechCrunch explained that demand for CPUs has grown as AI agents take on more tasks. Akamai, however, did not disclose the specific uses.
The deal includes dedicated cloud computing capacity and operational support. The seven-year term starts when each service begins. Additional commitments could add up to $9 billion, bringing the total to about $20 billion.
Akamai also gave Anthropic warrants, the right to buy a stake of up to roughly 5% in the company at $111.33 per share. Warrants covering roughly 2% vest upon the announcement, while the remaining 3% vest in increments of about 1% for every $3 billion in additional commitments.
Agents do more than give an answer. They run code and open browsers. CPUs handle that work.
So when building an AI service, it is easy to overlook some costs if you count only the fees for model calls. I think we also need to account for the cost of running code execution environments and browsers.
The name Akamai stands out, too. It is a CDN (content delivery network) company that has delivered websites and videos to users from nearby servers at thousands of locations around the world.
It is tempting to read this deal as a sign that AI workloads are moving to servers closer to users. But it is too early to say that. The uses have not been disclosed, and this may simply be a move to broaden the choice of computing suppliers.
Once the services start, it will be worth watching which tasks run in which regions.
Sources
- Akamai press release: $11.6 billion multiyear agreement with Anthropic, September 24, 2026.
- TechCrunch: Anthropic to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years in cloud deal, September 25, 2026 (U.S. time).
- Akamai Form 8-K (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing), accessed September 28, 2026.