Anthropic signs $11.6 billion cloud deal with Akamai, pushing its compute spending past $500 billion in under a year

Anthropic keeps buying compute. The AI company has signed a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud deal with Akamai Technologies, according to Reuters.

Anthropic gets a warrant for up to 5 percent of Akamai’s stock. Two percent is tied to the current contract, with another 3 percent if the deal expands by up to $9 billion. Akamai’s stock jumped 22 percent after hours. The company expects capital costs of about $5.5 billion and an extra $1.7 billion in spending before the end of 2026. Anthropic committed $45 billion in compute capacity from Nscale just last month. All told, the company has reportedly closed compute deals worth $517 billion in eleven months. Whether this pace is sustainable remains an open question. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are locking in capacity based on projected future revenue. CEO Dario Amodei warned in December 2025 that Anthropic could go bankrupt if its estimates were off by even a small margin. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently urged caution about unsustainable spending on compute buildouts. Follow The Decoder for AI news, background stories and expert analyses.