Anthropic Signs $1.8 Billion Computing Deal with Akamai

Anthropic signed a $1.8 billion computing deal with cloud services provider Akamai Technologies. The new deal was made to meet increased demand for AI software.

Akamai stated in its Q1 earnings call last week that it had struck a seven-year cloud computing deal with a leading frontier model provider, but did not name the company. Akamai CEO F. Thomson Leighton stated on the Q1 earnings call that the deal was the largest in the company’s history.

The deal is the latest in a frantic stretch of infrastructure moves by Anthropic, which has been scrambling to keep pace with demand for its Claude models. The AI player is seeking to raise $50 billion, which will result in a $900 billion valuation. Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a deal with SpaceX to use the entire capacity of the Colossus 1 data centre in Memphis, Tennessee, amounting to more than 300 megawatts of capacity and access to over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.

The AI player also has an up to 5-gigawatt compute power agreement with Amazon and uses its Trainium chips to train and run its AI models, while a separate 5-gigawatt agreement with Google and Broadcom is due to come online in 2027. It has a strategic partnership with Microsoft and Nvidia covering $30 billion of Azure capacity.