Akamai will spend about $5.5 billion to serve a seven-year Anthropic contract worth 2.6 years of its current revenue, and has paid for the business partly in warrants. On the same day Anthropic was reported to be seeking majority voting power for its seven co-founders before an IPO. The desk thinks Akamai is taking the bigger risk, and expects it to raise at least $2 billion of new debt before February.
Akamai closed on Thursday at $110.41. The exercise price on the warrant it handed Anthropic a few hours later is $111.33. For a seven-year commitment of $11.6 billion in cloud services, Akamai granted Anthropic the right to buy non-voting convertible preferred stock equal to 7.7 million common shares, about 5% of the company, at roughly the pre-announcement price. About 2% vests with the contract. Each further $3 billion of purchases, up to $9 billion more, vests another 1%. Akamai shares rose about 17% after hours, to $128.80, Reuters reported.
The same afternoon Reuters, citing The Information, reported that Anthropic is asking shareholders to approve a new class of stock that would give chief executive Dario Amodei and his six co-founders a combined 50.1% of voting power ahead of an IPO. The proposal has not been approved. The two stories show Anthropic, with a reported revenue run rate above $65 billion, using its buying power in two directions at once: extracting equity from suppliers and holding on to control from investors.
Akamai bears the risk. Its full-year revenue guidance is $4.445 billion to $4.53 billion. At the midpoint, $11.6 billion is 2.6 years of total revenue. Spread over seven years it is about $1.66 billion a year, against a Cloud Infrastructure Services line that booked $99 million in the second quarter, or around $400 million annualised. Akamai told investors it expects $150 million to $300 million of revenue from the deal in 2027 and an annualised run rate of about $1.7 billion by the end of 2028. Assume the rest of the business grows 6% a year and Anthropic would be roughly a quarter of Akamai's 2028 revenue. A content-delivery and security company becomes, in large part, one AI lab's landlord.
The workload is CPUs. The release says the capacity supports "CPU workload demands", and the company put the power draw at 95 to 105 megawatts, or about $22 million of annual revenue per megawatt at run rate. GPU clouds usually earn more per megawatt, but they also spend far more per megawatt on hardware, so the comparison flatters neither side. Agent-style products lean hard on general-purpose compute: running code, calling tools, holding sandboxes open. Akamai's thousands of points of presence, built up since it bought Linode in 2022, put that compute close to users.
The capital is the problem. Akamai estimates $5.5 billion of capex for the contract, with $1.7 billion of it pulled into this year to lock in memory and other components. In the first half of 2026 it generated $639 million of operating cash and spent $553 million on capex. Its whole capex budget last half-year, doubled, is about $1.1 billion. The Anthropic build alone is five times that. The company pointed to $4.6 billion of cash and marketable securities and a $1 billion revolver. On a rough run of the numbers, second-half operating cash of about $650 million against a normal half-year of capex plus the extra $1.7 billion leaves free cash flow for 2026 around $1.5 billion negative. Revenue of $11.6 billion against $5.5 billion of capex is about 2.1 times over seven years, before power, staff and bandwidth, and CPU servers are usually depreciated over five or six years, so a seven-year contract likely needs a refresh in the back half.
Then there is the warrant. Compare it with the deal that set the template. In October 2025 AMD gave OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares, about 10% of AMD, at an exercise price of one cent, vesting as OpenAI deployed up to 6 gigawatts and as AMD's stock hit targets up to $600. That was close to a free equity rebate. Nvidia's version ran the other way, investing in the customers who buy its chips, including up to $10 billion in Anthropic in November 2025 alongside Anthropic's $30 billion Azure commitment. Akamai's warrant is struck at market. At $128.80, the vested 2% (about 3.1 million shares) is worth about $54 million in intrinsic value, under 0.5% of the contract. It is a modest discount. It does mean Akamai's own shareholders now fund part of the customer acquisition cost, and every future dollar of upside is shared with the buyer.
The bull case is fair. Akamai has struggled for years to find growth above mid-single digits, and a seven-year contract from a customer of Anthropic's size is better visibility than most cloud providers ever get. It follows a $1.8 billion Anthropic commitment disclosed in May, so the relationship has been tested. And the capex is contracted before it is spent. Contract quality depends on counterparty quality and on termination terms nobody has published. Anthropic can afford it today. Whether a seven-year CPU commitment survives three hardware generations is a separate question, and Akamai's balance sheet, not Anthropic's, absorbs the answer.
Anthropic's voting plan adds another layer. The company is a Delaware public benefit corporation whose Long-Term Benefit Trust holds Class T shares that elect a growing share of the board. According to the report, the trust would keep the power to appoint a majority of the seven-seat board, the founders' board seats would rise from two to three, and board elections would sit outside the founders' 50.1%. The founders' block would last as long as three of the seven keep a minimum stake. Employees would get a class of stock that can break ties on some issues.
Palantir's Class F shares cap its three founders at about 49.999999% of the vote. Mark Zuckerberg holds about 61% of Meta's. Larry Page and Sergey Brin hold about 51% of Alphabet's. Anthropic's founders would sit a hair above Palantir's, with less economic ownership than any of them. The trust's own failsafe matters: its terms can be changed without the trustees if a large enough supermajority of stockholders agrees. With 50.1% in seven hands, no such supermajority exists without the founders. The structure protects the trust from outside shareholders and makes the founders its only realistic amenders.
Index rules will not stop it. S&P Dow Jones Indices dropped its multi-class ban in April 2023. FTSE Russell requires only that free-float shares carry more than 5% of voting rights, and outside holders would keep 49.9%. Nasdaq's fast-entry rule, in force since May, can put a top-40-sized IPO into the Nasdaq-100 within 15 trading days. Any governance discount will show up in the offer price.
Winners: Anthropic, which buys CPU capacity and an option on its supplier, and its founders if the vote passes. Losers: Akamai's free cash flow for at least two years and, at the margin, public investors in both companies, who get less say. The desk expects Akamai to raise at least $2 billion of new debt or convertible notes before it reports fourth-quarter results in February 2027, and expects Anthropic's public filing to show the 50.1% founder class with the trust's board majority intact. Akamai's third-quarter results in early November will show the first of the $1.7 billion capex pull-forward. The U.S. midterms on November 3 are the date Reuters has said Anthropic may wait out before listing. If Akamai funds the build from cash alone, or Anthropic's filing drops the founder class, this call is wrong.