Akamai Soars 16% on $11.6B Anthropic CPU Megadeal

Akamai Technologies jumped as much as 16.4% after signing a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud contract with Anthropic, its largest deal ever.

Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) signed a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud services contract with Anthropic, the company's largest contract ever, with the option to expand toward roughly $20 billion. The pact covers dedicated CPU computing capacity and managed support services, extending an earlier $1.8 billion agreement the two companies struck this year. Anthropic also received a warrant to buy Series B shares at $111.33 that convert into 7.7 million Akamai common shares, with a slice equal to about 2% of Akamai's stock vesting when the contract starts. Akamai estimates deal-related capital spending at about $5.5 billion and expects $150 million to $300 million in Anthropic revenue in the year ahead. Service is slated to begin in the second half of 2027.

Shares of Akamai briefly soared as much as 16.4% to $128.46 before paring the gain, per CNBC, while Schaeffer's Investment Research had the stock last seen up 14.2% at $126.10 and noted the pop was tracking toward AKAM's best single session since a 26.5% post-earnings surge on May 8. The move carried extra fuel from a short squeeze: Schaeffer's reports 19.02 million shares sold short — 13.5% of the float — that would take shorts more than five trading days to buy back at average volume. Options traders piled in too, with the weekly 9/25 130-strike call the most active contract.

What makes the deal distinctive is the hardware. The new computing power targets central processing units rather than graphics processing units, and CNBC reports many technologists consider networks of CPUs better suited to the coordinated computing tasks agentic AI requires. That thesis rippled across chip stocks: Bank of America raised its AMD price target by $100 to $720, telling Stocktwits the Anthropic-Akamai deal 'further supports CPU importance in the agentic era,' with the server CPU market projected to grow from $61 billion in 2026 to $211 billion by 2030. AMD, which crossed a $1 trillion market cap this week, gained up to 1.8% premarket on the news.

Analysts were overwhelmingly bullish on the growth math. CNBC reports Morgan Stanley kept an Overweight rating with a $165 target, saying 2027 revenue growth estimates should rise from 12.5% to about 16% versus just 5% growth in 2025. Oppenheimer ($180) and Evercore ISI ($175) both rate the stock Outperform. The dissent is valuation: per StocksToTrade, Piper Sandler upgraded to Overweight but set a $125 target, while Citigroup cut its target to $122 and stayed Neutral.

The reward comes with real risk. Akamai said the $5.5 billion of deal-related capex would top its entire 2025 spending by more than sixfold, with most of the outlay landing next year on servers, networking equipment and chips, Briefs Finance reports. Management guided to materially higher capex while leaving 2026 revenue guidance unchanged — a spend-now, prove-revenue-later setup. CEO Tom Leighton called it a 'big step up in capex' and said returns look attractive, adding that cloud contract revenue could overtake Akamai's other segments 'fairly soon.'

Akamai has now signed $14.6 billion in total cloud commitments year-to-date, which DA Davidson estimates carries roughly 30% EBIT margins at full revenue run-rate. Leighton said Akamai is talking with 'all the major players,' including hyperscalers and large enterprises, about additional work — and has never before attached a warrant like this to a cloud deal, calling it 'a serious step, but I think in this case it made sense.' Some on Wall Street remain uneasy with circular AI setups where cloud, hardware and AI firms buy from and invest in one another, since that can blur how much end demand is real. Traders will watch Anthropic usage milestones, margin trends, and whether Akamai lands more CPU-based deals.