Anthropic's Compute Web Grows: Stream Data Centers Talks, the Nexus Texas Campus, and Now an $11.6B Akamai Deal
Update (September 25-26, 2026). Anthropic signed a $11.6 billion, seven-year contract with Akamai Technologies for computing power — the largest deal in Akamai's history, expanding an earlier $1.8B computing agreement between the two. Notably, Akamai will supply CPUs — general-purpose capacity for the data centers supporting AI services — not GPUs, a demand signal for the non-accelerator side of the AI buildout.
The financing structure is the telling part: Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant to purchase Series B shares at $111.33 each, converting into 7.7 million common shares — about 2% of Akamai's stock vesting alongside the computing agreement (expected to begin in the second half of 2027), the rest over the seven-year term. Akamai CEO Tom Leighton called it the first time Akamai agreed to such a warrant in a cloud deal, a "serious step." Akamai expects ~$5.5B of capital spending tied to the contract ("more than six times last year's spending," mostly servers, chips and networking, bulk in 2027), with Anthropic-related revenue of $150-300M next year reaching "an annual run rate of about USD 1.7 billion" by 2028. The deal lands amid Wall Street's "circular AI deal" concerns — vendors financing customers who buy from them.
This stacks onto the week's earlier Anthropic compute items: early talks to lease up to 1GW directly from Stream Data Centers (Apollo-majority-owned), and the $15B Morgan Stanley-led financing for Nexus Data Centers' 1.6GW Texas campus (Google Backstops $15 Billion Loan for Anthropic's 1.6GW Texas Data Center Campus) — with a Google backstop.
Why it matters: Anthropic is building capacity through a widening web of vendor-financed, warrant-and-debt structures rather than pure capex — weeks before a reported IPO (Anthropic's Draft S-1 in Print: $80.7B H1 Loss (Mostly Paper), $16.3B H1 Revenue — and a Compute Bill That Could Hit $750B). The Akamai warrant makes the circularity explicit on the customer side too, and the CPU focus shows the buildout is broader than the GPU race (NVIDIA's Vera Rubin Era Goes Live: CoreWeave Brings Up First Multi-Rack Vera Rubin NVL72 Cluster).