Akamai’s AI infrastructure push gathers pace with $11.6 billion Anthropic deal

Akamai Technologies Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AKAM) $11.6 billion, seven-year cloud infrastructure agreement with Anthropic marks a significant step-up in the cybersecurity company’s push into AI infrastructure. The commitment, which could expand by a further $9 billion, adds to the more than $2.8 billion of multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) contracts the company has secured across its customer base this year.

The Anthropic PBC agreement comes as Akamai’s cloud infrastructure business is already benefiting from growing demand for compute from AI and other compute-intensive workloads.

The scale of the deal comes with a substantial upfront investment. Akamai expects to spend about $5.5 billion in capital expenditure over the life of the initial commitment, including $1.7 billion in additional spending in 2026 to secure and pre-purchase components such as memory. The company does not expect the agreement to affect its 2026 revenue guidance.

Visible Alpha consensus points to the sharp acceleration in the investment required to support the rapid expansion of Akamai’s CIS business. Purchases of property and equipment are expected to rise 184% year-on-year in 2026 to $2.3 billion.

Akamai’s CIS business has already been growing rapidly. Visible Alpha consensus shows CIS revenue is expected to rise 50% year-on-year in 2026 to $471 million. Analysts project the business to reach $2.8 billion in revenue by 2030, representing roughly 40% of group revenue, compared with about 10% in 2026.

Overall, analysts expect total revenue to increase 7% in 2026 to $4.5 billion, with the Security Technology Group remaining the largest contributor at $2.5 billion, up 10%. By contrast, Delivery and other cloud applications revenue is expected to decline 5% to $1.6 billion.

This article was published by Visible Alpha, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.