Akamai signs US$11.6bn agreement with Anthropic

Akamai has announced a seven-year, US$11.6 billion ($15.53 billion) agreement with Anthropic to provide distributed cloud infrastructure and software to support ever-increasing AI workloads.

Under the agreement, Anthropic will leverage Akamai Cloud’s distributed AI infrastructure and software for its CPU workload demands. The deal adds to the more than $2.8 billion in multi-year cloud infrastructure service commitments across Akamai’s customer base previously announced this year. These agreements underscore a growing demand for Akamai to enable customers to build, deploy and operate AI workloads at scale.

Akamai has meanwhile issued a warrant to Anthropic for the purchase of convertible stock representing the equivalent of 7.7 million shares of Akamai common stock on an as‍-‍converted basis. This is equal to around 5% of Akamai’s common stock outstanding. The stock will be exercisable at US$111.33 per share of common stock.

The agreement means that Anthropic will pay Akamai at least $11.6 billion over seven years to use its cloud infrastructure and software in an expansion of the partnership between the two companies.

Akamai co-founder and CEO Dr Tom Leighton said the company is thrilled to have been chosen by Anthropic due to its capabilities for building and deploying AI infrastructure at scale.

“Akamai has an unparalleled reputation for helping our customers achieve their business-critical goals and build the future. Our expanding global footprint, combined with our years of experience serving the world’s largest enterprises, positions us to be the infrastructure provider for secure and responsible AI applications and workloads,” he said.

Akamai Cloud supports a continuum of compute from core to edge, with a vastly distributed network spanning thousands of points of presence. The platform is built with diversified hardware to enable customers to build and run applications and optimise how they are served to their users and agents. Akamai’s global infrastructure enables the full lifecycle of applications in the AI era, and ensures they are fast, reliable and secure, according to the company.

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