Anthropic reportedly signs $1.8 billion Akamai cloud deal as AI infrastructure race continues
The agreement was reported by Bloomberg News, which said Anthropic signed the deal to meet growing demand for its AI software. Akamai itself has confirmed a seven-year, $1.8 billion commitment from a “leading, U.S.-based frontier model provider,” though it has not publicly named the customer.
The deal gives Akamai a major win in its effort to expand beyond its traditional content delivery and cybersecurity businesses into cloud infrastructure for AI companies. In its first-quarter earnings release, Akamai said cloud infrastructure services revenue rose 40% year over year to $95 million, while total revenue increased 6% to $1.074 billion.
Akamai CEO Tom Leighton called the unnamed customer commitment a validation of the company’s position as “a key infrastructure provider in the AI economy.” The company said the customer had committed $1.8 billion over seven years for cloud infrastructure services, making the agreement one of the clearest signs yet that AI labs are looking beyond the biggest hyperscale cloud providers for additional capacity.
For Anthropic, the reported Akamai agreement comes as the company is trying to keep up with demand for Claude, its family of AI models and chatbot products. The AI startup has already relied heavily on major cloud and chip partners, including Amazon and Google, as it competes with OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other frontier AI developers.
The deal also arrives alongside reports that Anthropic is exploring a massive new fundraising round that could value the company at close to $1 trillion. Reuters, citing the Financial Times, reported that Anthropic is weighing raising tens of billions of dollars this summer to fund a major expansion in computing capacity.
