Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKAM) said on September 24 that it has signed an $11.6 billion agreement with Anthropic, running for seven years. The deal can grow to roughly $20 billion.
The shares had fallen 6.78% before the announcement. They opened 14% higher the next morning, then gave almost all of it back to close up 3.20% at $113.94. The number worth sitting with is the comparison to Akamai itself. The company is worth about $16 billion. It has just signed a single contract worth more than two-thirds of that, with one customer.
READ ALSO: Akamai (AKAM) Wants to Be the Bouncer for Your AI Agents
A Content Delivery Company Just Became an AI Landlord:
Akamai spent decades moving web pages closer to the people reading them. That business was steady and unexciting, and the market valued it accordingly.
Anthropic is buying something different. It wants distributed capacity for the ordinary computing that sits around an AI model, the work of running agents rather than training them. Akamai’s servers already sit in more locations than almost any rival network, which turns out to be the thing Anthropic is paying for.
Anthropic is backing it with more than a signature. Akamai has issued it a warrant over up to roughly 5% of the company. That structure is unusual and revealing. A customer taking equity in its supplier is buying insurance that the capacity will actually exist, which tells you how scarce that capacity has become.
The scale is the other thing to sit with. The contracted amount is worth close to three years of everything Akamai currently sells. That is not a deal that adds to a company. It is one that changes what the company is, and it repositions Akamai from a mature delivery network into a supplier of AI compute almost overnight.
DON’T MISS: Jim Cramer Calls Akamai (AKAM) “Terrific” and Cloudflare (NET) One of His Favorites
The Money Goes Out Long Before it Comes In:
Revenue from this contract does not start until the second half of 2027. It only reaches an annual run rate of about $1.7 billion by the end of the following year.
The spending starts now. Akamai plans roughly $5.5 billion of capital expenditure to build what Anthropic has ordered. For a company of this size, that is a very large bet placed against a promise.
That is a two-year gap between cash leaving and cash arriving, and Akamai has to fund it while the existing business carries on as normal.
The warrant costs something too. Handing over up to 5% of the company means existing shareholders own less of whatever this becomes. It is a discount on the contract that does not appear in the headline number.
Concentration is the last worry. Akamai has replaced a diversified customer base with one relationship large enough to define the company, and Anthropic is a young business.
Conclusion:
Akamai has turned a mature content delivery business into an AI infrastructure story overnight. The contract is worth more than two-thirds of its market value, and the customer took equity to secure the capacity. However, the revenue is two years away, the spending is not, and the company is now tied to a single counterparty. The number to watch is capital expenditure in the next few quarters. That is where investors will learn whether Akamai can carry the build without straining the rest of the business.
Market Sentiment:
Akamai Technologies, Inc. was held by 62 hedge funds with a combined stake value of about $2.2 billion at the end of Q2 2026 in the Insider Monkey database. This is down from 74 hedge fund holders with a cumulative investment value of around $2.5 billion in the previous quarter.
READ NEXT: Visa (V) vs American Express (AXP): Which is a Better Stock to Buy and Twilio (TWLO) Keeps Climbing as Investors Rediscover its AI Business
This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
