Anthropic Signs $1.8 Billion Cloud Deal with Akamai, Marking Largest Contract in Company History
May 11, 2026
Anthropic Signs $1.8 Billion Cloud Deal with Akamai, Marking Largest Contract in Company History
Akamai Technologies has secured a landmark $1.8 billion cloud infrastructure contract with AI lab Anthropic, the largest customer deal in the company’s history, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The seven-year agreement was disclosed during Akamai’s Q1 2026 earnings call last week, though the company initially withheld the client’s identity.
Akamai CEO Frank Thomson Leighton described the deal as “a landmark seven-year $1.8 billion commitment for our cloud infrastructure services by a leading frontier model company.” He noted that the agreement follows a $200 million contract announced in February with a major U.S. tech company also at the forefront of the AI revolution. “These leaders in AI have chosen Akamai because their AI workloads need the scale, performance, and reliability that our cloud platform provides,” Leighton said.
The contract underscores the growing demand for distributed cloud infrastructure tailored to AI workloads. While Akamai has not disclosed the specific hardware Anthropic intends to lease, the earlier $200 million deal involved Nvidia Blackwell RTX Pro 6000 Server Edition clusters. These GPUs are less powerful than other Blackwell variants but are optimized for smaller-scale deployments, a niche where Akamai has established a strong presence.
Earlier this year, Akamai announced plans to deploy thousands of Blackwell GPUs across its infrastructure, later expanding the initiative with the rollout of its “AI Grid” across 4,400 edge locations. Using Nvidia’s AI Grid reference design, the company aims to deploy Nvidia hardware globally, enabling enterprises to run agentic and physical AI workloads “with the responsiveness of local compute and the scale of the global web.”
Anthropic has been aggressively expanding its cloud and capacity agreements. Most recently, the AI lab secured exclusive use of SpaceX-xAI’s Colossus 1 data center, which houses approximately 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. It has also signed deals with Google, Amazon Web Services, and CoreWeave, reflecting a strategic push to secure the massive compute resources required for training and deploying advanced AI models.
Following the announcement of the Akamai contract, the company’s shares surged 27 percent the next day. For the first quarter of 2026, Akamai reported revenues of $1.074 billion, a 6 percent increase year-over-year. Its Cloud Infrastructure Services business contributed $95 million, up 40 percent from the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA stood at $427 million, a 3 percent decline year-over-year, while income from operations fell 26 percent to $114 million, with the operating margin dropping four percentage points to 11 percent.
The deal highlights the intensifying competition among cloud providers to secure high-value contracts with leading AI companies, as workloads become more distributed and demand for edge computing grows. For Akamai, traditionally known for content delivery and cybersecurity, the agreement signals a strategic pivot toward becoming a key player in AI infrastructure.
Source: datacenterdynamics
