Anthropic teams up with Akamai in $11.6bn cloud partnership

Akamai Cloud and Anthropic have announced a partnership extension that will see the AI developer commit to $11.6 billion in compute spending over the next seven years.

According to Akamai, the multi-year commitment will enable Anthropic to draw upon its distributed AI infrastructure to meet “accelerating CPU workload demands”.

"Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution, and we are thrilled they chose Akamai’s capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale,” said Akamai co-founder and CEO Tom Leighton.

“Our expanding global footprint, combined with our years of experience serving the world’s largest enterprises, positions us to be the infrastructure provider for secure and responsible AI applications and workloads.”

The announcement builds on a previous deal struck between the two firms earlier this year and highlights a “growing demand” for infrastructure services, according to Akamai.

At the time, the firm said this would include more than $2.8 billion in Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) commitments.

As part of the move, Akamai has issued a warrant for Anthropic for the purchase of non-voting convertible Series B stock. In a statement, Akamai Cloud said it projects around $5.5 billion in capital expenditures related to the agreement.

Rapid infrastructure investment

The move marks the latest in a string of infrastructure-related deals for Anthropic over the last two years.

With the firm ramping up development timelines and expanding its customer base, Anthropic has penned a number of multi-billion-dollar deals for compute capacity.

In May, for example, the company announced a deal with SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee, hosted by xAI.

This gave the company access to more than 300 megawatts of new compute capacity, as well as roughly 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.

That deal came hot on the heels of a similar partnership expansion with Broadcom and Google to use “multiple gigawatts” of the latter’s tensor processing unit (TPU) chips.

In February, Anthropic raised $30 billion as part of a Series G funding round to support frontier model development and infrastructure expansion.

Led by GIC and Coatue, the funding round brought the AI developer’s valuation to $380 billion at the time, marking a near-doubling in the space of a year.

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