Akamai Shares Soared After the Deal with Anthropic: The Market Has Faith in the Cloud Business

Shares of U.S.-based Akamai Technologies, which, among other things, provides cloud computing and cybersecurity services, surged 20.65% to $133.20 per share in after-hours trading on the Nasdaq on September 24. The surge followed the announcement of a seven-year, $11.6 billion contract between Akamai and AI developer Anthropic, according to Reuters. According to Bloomberg, the agreement to provide computing power is the largest in Akamai’s history. According to Yahoo Finance, the provider’s total market capitalization stood at $15.87 billion prior to the announcement of the deal.

Prior to that, Akamai shares had closed the main trading session deep in the red, falling 6.78% to $110.4.

For the past three months, the analyst consensus on Akamai has remained at “Overweight”—a recommendation to allocate a higher proportion of a portfolio to its shares, according to FactSet data cited by The Wall Street Journal. The average price target for the stock, based on forecasts from 28 analysts, is $156—more than 40% higher than the previous day’s closing price.

According to Bloomberg, content delivery and cybersecurity currently account for the bulk of Akamai’s revenue. In search of new growth opportunities, the company is actively expanding its computing business. It will provide Anthropic with central processing unit (CPU) capacity, which is once again in high demand in data centers serving AI services.

Anthropic's investment in Akamai "can be seen as a vote of confidence in the sustained demand for cloud services driven by the development of AI," Reuters quotes Emarketer analyst Jacob Born as saying.

Constellation Research highlights the demand for inference—the operation of pre-trained models. “Although Akamai also offers computing power on graphics processing units (GPUs, which are widely used for training new AI models. — note by Oninvest), it is the boom in AI inference that makes its distributed infrastructure particularly attractive,” the research firm’s website notes.

According to Akamai's estimates, capital expenditures under the agreement with Anthropic alone will total about $5.5 billion, Bloomberg reports. This is more than six times the company's total capital expenditures for 2025.

Anthropic has also received a warrant allowing it to acquire up to a 5% stake in Akamai, according to Reuters. About 2% is tied to the current contract, while the right to the remaining 3% is contingent on the agreement being expanded by up to an additional $9 billion.

Akamai CEO Tom Leighton told Bloomberg that the company had agreed for the first time to issue such a warrant as part of a cloud contract with a client. “This is a significant step, but I think it was justified in this case,” he said.

Iconic short seller Michael Burry and other Wall Street investors are concerned about cross-investments among cloud providers, hardware manufacturers, and AI developers—who are simultaneously purchasing each other’s products, according to Bloomberg. In their view, this kind of circular financing makes it difficult to assess the actual demand for artificial intelligence.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor