Shares of Akamai Technologies Inc. jumped more than 20% in after-hours trading today after the cloud and cybersecurity company revealed an $11.6 billion, seven-year deal to supply computing capacity to artificial intelligence developer Anthropic PBC.

The agreement is built around central processing unit workloads, where Akamai said Anthropic’s demand is accelerating. Akamai Cloud will provide the capacity from a distributed network that runs to thousands of points of presence. Anthropic can add as much as $9 billion in further commitments under the terms, for a potential total of about $20 billion.

Akamai is also giving Anthropic a possible equity stake. The warrant it issued covers nonvoting convertible Series B preferred stock that would convert into up to about 5% of Akamai’s common shares, with an exercise price of $111.33. About 2% should vest in connection with today’s commitment. The rest depends on Anthropic spending more, and each further $3 billion it commits to cloud services over the warrant’s seven-year term vests roughly another 1%.

The cloud and content delivery network company said the deal will not change its 2026 revenue guidance. Capital spending tied to the $11.6 billion commitment is estimated at about $5.5 billion in total. The company is also raising its 2026 capital expenditures by about $1.7 billion to secure and prepurchase supply chain components, memory among them.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Tom Leighton said Anthropic chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale. An expanding global footprint and years spent serving the world’s largest enterprises put Akamai in a position to be “the infrastructure provider for secure and responsible AI applications and workloads,” he said.

The two companies were already working together. In May, Akamai’s first-quarter report included a $1.8 billion, seven-year commitment from an unnamed frontier model company, and the disclosure pushed the stock up more than 26% in late trading. The customer was Anthropic, Bloomberg reported the next day, citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Today’s deal comes on top of more than $2.8 billion in multiyear Cloud Infrastructure Services contracts that Akamai had announced earlier in the year. Revenue from that business came to $99 million in the second quarter, up 39% from a year earlier.

Anthropic has spent the year lining up capacity from several suppliers besides Akamai. A 20-year lease signed in July gives Anthropic about 401 megawatts at a TeraWulf Inc. data center campus in Hawesville, Ky., and TeraWulf expects about $19 billion in contracted revenue from it. Memory and storage are coming from Micron Technology Inc. under a supply agreement signed in June, and Micron also invested in Anthropic’s Series H round.

Photo: Akamai/YouTube