Akamai's shares jump 27% following a $1.8 billion cloud agreement with Anthropic as the CDN firm shifts towards AI infrastructure.

      TL;DR

      Akamai has announced a $1.8 billion, seven-year cloud agreement with Anthropic, marking its largest contract to date. The company's stock surged by 27% in a single day, signaling significant validation of its shift towards AI cloud services.

      Akamai Technologies revealed a $1.8 billion, seven-year cloud infrastructure contract with a client it characterized as “a leading frontier model provider.” Bloomberg identified this client as Anthropic. The stock jumped 27% in one day, representing the largest increase in the company’s 28-year history. Once focused on delivering web content rapidly, Akamai has now transitioned into an AI infrastructure provider thanks to this single contract.

      This agreement is at the forefront of a quarter where Akamai's cloud infrastructure services revenue grew by 40% year-over-year, reaching $95 million, while its traditional content delivery business saw a decline of 7%. Investors are reevaluating the company not based on its past two decades, but on the potential indicated by this one contract. The critical question remains whether such a substantial customer commitment signifies a true transformation or merely a concentration risk.

      The contract

      The $1.8 billion deal is now Akamai's most significant ever. Revenue from this contract is anticipated to commence in the fourth quarter of 2026, expected to contribute roughly $20 to $25 million during that time. The seven-year duration gives a level of predictability that Akamai's legacy CDN operations, which traditionally work on shorter cycles amid ongoing price pressure, have not provided before.

      This announcement follows a $200 million, four-year cloud services contract Akamai signed in February with another unnamed U.S. technology company, which includes the use of a multi-thousand NVIDIA Blackwell GPU cluster. Collectively, these contracts signify a $2 billion commitment to cloud revenue from customers that Akamai did not have just two years ago.

      Anthropic has committed to utilizing all of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center capacity, which adds over 300 megawatts and more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs to its computational resources. The Akamai deal follows the same rationale, as Anthropic seeks to purchase compute capacity from all available sources due to the high demand for its AI model, Claude. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, reported an “80x growth” in annual revenue and usage during the first quarter of 2026, and stated the company is “working as quickly as possible” to obtain more computing power.

      The pivot

      Founded in 1998 at MIT to address web content delivery challenges, Akamai has spent two decades as the world's leading content delivery network, efficiently caching and distributing web pages, video streams, and software downloads across over 4,000 locations in 130 countries. This CDN business made Akamai essential to the internet but also turned it into a commodity.

      Under CEO Tom Leighton, who transitioned from chief scientist to CEO in 2013, the company has spent the last ten years diversifying. The first pivot was into cybersecurity, which now represents 55% of its revenue, amounting to $590 million per quarter, and has grown 11% year-over-year. The second pivot into cloud computing began with the $900 million acquisition of Linode in 2022 and is now producing the growth that investors have been anticipating.

      Leighton stated in an interview with CNBC that this deal validates the company's “different approach” and noted that Akamai has “a very strong pipeline of major enterprise customers, including those with substantial cloud needs.” At NVIDIA’s GTC event in March, the company announced plans to deploy thousands of NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPUs and create what it called “the industry’s first global-scale implementation of NVIDIA’s AI Grid,” aiming to bring AI inference closer to end users in order to decrease latency and expenses.

      The customer

      Anthropic's choice to enter a $1.8 billion agreement with Akamai highlights a key limitation in the current AI infrastructure landscape: demand for computing power surpasses the capacity of individual providers. Anthropic already utilizes Claude on Google’s tensor processing units, Amazon's custom chips, and NVIDIA hardware. It has also entered into a partnership with SpaceX for data center resources and is investigating the development of its own chips.

      While Anthropic is looking to design its own AI chips with a revenue run rate exceeding $30 billion, creating custom silicon is a lengthy process. In the meantime, the company is procuring capacity from all available sources. Akamai’s extensive network of edge locations, initially established for CDN, provides a unique advantage over centralized hyperscale data centers by enabling inference workloads to be executed closer to end users, which reduces latency for the real-time applications that enterprises are starting to implement.

      Nebius acquired Eigen AI for $643 million with the goal of optimizing inference performance, betting that the key aspect of AI infrastructure is not merely raw computing power but the efficiency of its use. Ak