Anthropic and Akamai Sign $1.8 Billion Computing Power Deal

Bloomberg reports that artificial intelligence company Anthropic has signed a $1.8 billion, seven-year cloud infrastructure agreement with cloud computing and cybersecurity service provider Akamai Technologies to meet its AI software's rapidly increasing computational power demands.

Akamai's share price soared by more than 26% after hours due to this news. This is the largest single order in Akamai's history.

The company's CEO, Tom Leighton, stated in the financial report that the deal "further establishes Akamai as a key infrastructure provider for the AI economy," but did not explicitly disclose the identity of the customer in the report, only describing the other party as "a leading edge model provider."

Compute Power Expansion Continues

This transaction is the latest move in Anthropic's recent series of large-scale compute power deployments. The company has pledged to purchase cloud computing resources from Google worth 2 trillion USD over the next five years and signed agreements with Google and Broadcom in April this year to secure multiple gigawatts (GW) of next-generation TPU compute power. Additionally, Anthropic has entered into strategic cooperation agreements with Microsoft and Nvidia involving Azure compute power procurement and chip design joint optimizations.

Anthropic's demand side is also growing astonishingly. The company disclosed that the annualized revenue and usage volume for the first quarter recorded an astonishing growth of up to 80 times, with the number of enterprise customers spending over 1 million USD per year increasing from 500 in two months to over 1,000. However, compute power supply remains its main bottleneck—according to internal investor materials, inference costs exceeded internal expectations by 23%, and the gross margin dropped to about 40%.

Akamai's Transformation Validation

For Akamai, its traditional CDN and security service revenue declined by 7% year-on-year to $389 million, while cloud infrastructure business revenue grew by 40% year-on-year to $95 million, becoming the fastest-growing core business segment. This seven-year contract with Anthropic is seen by the market as a key signal of Akamai's transformation from a traditional CDN provider to an AI inference compute cloud.

The AI compute power arms race is involving more and more non-traditional cloud service providers. After Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, among other hyper-scale cloud providers, Akamai's entry indicates that Anthropic is looking to diversify its compute power supply chain to hedge against the risk of over-reliance on a few suppliers.