Akamai's stock jumps 27% due to a $1.8 billion deal with Anthropic as the CDN company shifts its focus to AI infrastructure.

      TL;DR

      Akamai announced a significant $1.8 billion, seven-year cloud deal with Anthropic, marking its largest contract to date. This news led to a 27% increase in stock price in one day, as the company's shift towards AI cloud services gained notable recognition.

      Akamai Technologies revealed a $1.8 billion cloud infrastructure agreement with a customer classified as “a leading frontier model provider.” Bloomberg has identified this customer as Anthropic. The stock jumped 27% in a single day, marking the steepest rise in the company's 28-year history. A business that initially focused on fast web content delivery has now transitioned into an AI infrastructure provider thanks to this one contract.

      This agreement is central to a quarter in which Akamai's cloud infrastructure services revenue increased by 40% year-on-year to $95 million, while its traditional content delivery business saw a 7% decline. Investors are reassessing the company's value based on its potential, as suggested by this contract, rather than its historical performance. The key question remains whether such a large commitment from one customer signals a major transformation or if it poses a concentration risk.

      The Deal

      The $1.8 billion contract is the largest in Akamai’s history, with revenue from this commitment anticipated to begin in the fourth quarter of 2026, contributing around $20 to $25 million during that period. The seven-year duration provides a level of predictability that Akamai’s traditional content delivery business, which operates on shorter cycles and faces ongoing price pressures, has not offered.

      This deal follows a previously established $200 million, four-year cloud services agreement from February with another unnamed U.S. tech firm, which will utilize a multi-thousand NVIDIA Blackwell GPU cluster. Combined, these contracts represent $2 billion in committed cloud revenue from clients that Akamai didn't have two years prior.

      Anthropic has agreed to take on all of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center capacity, which includes over 300 megawatts and more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The rationale behind the Akamai deal is similar: Anthropic is securing computing capacity from all available providers due to the demand for Claude surpassing supply. CEO Dario Amodei noted the company experienced an “80x growth” in annualized revenue and usage in the first quarter of 2026, and is “working as quickly as possible” to acquire additional computing resources.

      The Pivot

      Founded in 1998 at MIT, Akamai was created to tackle the challenge of web content delivery without congestion. For two decades, it has operated the world's largest content delivery network, caching and distributing web pages, video streams, and software downloads across over 4,000 locations in 130 countries. The CDN business made Akamai essential to the internet but has also turned into a commodity.

      Under CEO Tom Leighton, who transitioned from chief scientist to CEO in 2013, the company has spent a decade diversifying its offerings. The initial pivot was into cybersecurity, which now accounts for 55% of revenue at $590 million quarterly, growing by 11% year on year. The second pivot, into cloud computing, initiated with the $900 million acquisition of Linode in 2022, is now yielding the growth investors have been anticipating.

      Leighton stated to CNBC that the contract validates the company’s “different approach” and that Akamai has “a very strong pipeline of major enterprise customers, including some 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 termed the “industry’s first global-scale implementation of NVIDIA’s AI Grid,” aimed at reducing latency and costs for AI inference closer to end users.

      The Customer

      Anthropic’s choice to enter into a $1.8 billion agreement with Akamai illustrates a key constraint within the current AI infrastructure market: the demand for computing power outstrips the capacities of any single provider. Anthropic currently operates Claude on Google tensor processing units, Amazon’s custom chips, and NVIDIA hardware, while having secured data center capacity from SpaceX. The company is also contemplating the development of its own chips.

      While Anthropic is looking into building its own AI chips now that its annual revenue has surged past $30 billion, custom silicon development is a lengthy process. In the meantime, the company is securing capacity wherever available. Akamai’s widespread network of edge locations, initially designed for CDN traffic, offers advantages that centralized hyperscale data centers lack: the ability to execute inference workloads near end users, significantly lowering latency for the real-time applications that enterprises are starting to implement.

      Nebius’s acquisition of Eigen AI for $643 million aims to enhance inference performance, betting that the most valuable aspect of AI infrastructure is not just raw computing power but also the efficiency with which that power is utilized. Akamai’s proposal to Anthropic is based on a comparable premise: that