Akamai Stock Soars to 22-Year High After Anthropic Cloud Deal

TLDR

• Akamai signed a $1.8 billion, seven-year cloud computing deal with Anthropic.
• Akamai shares jumped 27% in a single day, the biggest gain in over 22 years.
• The deal is the largest customer contract in Akamai’s history.
• Anthropic is spreading its computing needs across many suppliers, not just major cloud providers.
• Anthropic’s revenue run rate has crossed $30 billion after rapid growth this year.

Akamai Technologies has landed the biggest customer deal in its history. The company will provide cloud infrastructure services to Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot.

The agreement is worth $1.8 billion over seven years. That works out to about $257 million a year on average.

Bloomberg News first identified Anthropic as the customer, citing people familiar with the matter. Both companies declined to comment on the report.

Akamai disclosed the deal during its first-quarter 2026 earnings call without naming the customer. Investors reacted fast once the size of the contract became clear.

Akamai’s Stock Sees Historic Jump

Akamai shares closed up 27% on May 8. That was the company’s largest single-day stock gain in more than 22 years.

Akamai Technologies, Inc., AKAM

The rally continued into the next trading session. Shares rose another 28% on Friday, reaching $149.05.

Akamai’s Cloud Infrastructure Services unit had already grown 40% year-over-year, reaching $95 million in the first quarter. The Anthropic contract adds a large new customer on top of that growth.

Akamai chief executive Tom Leighton said the deal is the company’s largest ever. He also pointed to a separate $200 million cloud agreement signed in February with another technology company.

Akamai started as a content delivery network in 1998, helping move video and web traffic faster. The company expanded into cloud computing after buying Linode in 2022 for $900 million.

That purchase combined Linode’s developer-focused computing tools with Akamai’s network of more than 4,200 locations across over 130 countries. The company has since launched services aimed at artificial intelligence inference, including Akamai Cloud Inference in March 2025 and Akamai Inference Cloud in October 2025.

Anthropic’s Broader Computing Push

The Akamai contract is part of a larger pattern. Anthropic has been securing computing capacity from multiple suppliers in recent months.

Days before the Akamai news became public, Anthropic announced a deal with SpaceX. That agreement gives Anthropic access to computing capacity at a data center in Memphis, including more than 220,000 Nvidia processors.

Anthropic also has a cloud computing agreement with Google reported to be worth roughly $200 billion over five years. The company additionally has commitments with Amazon Web Services, CoreWeave, Nvidia, and Broadcom.

At a developer conference on May 6, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei said the company’s revenue grew 80 times year-over-year on an annualized basis in the first quarter. That growth pushed Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate past $30 billion.

Akamai’s forward-looking statements note standard risks tied to large contracts. These include whether the customer can meet its purchase obligations and whether Akamai can build out infrastructure on schedule.

The deal remains a commitment rather than revenue that has already been collected. Akamai will report progress on the contract in future earnings updates.

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