Akamai Stock Soars on $11.6 Billion Deal With Anthropic
Akamai Stock Soars on $11.6 Billion Deal With Anthropic
Aaron McDadeFri, September 25, 2026 at 2:00 PM UTC
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With Friday’s gains, Akamai shares are up nearly 40% from the start of the year.Credit: Matthias Balk / picture alliance via Getty ImagesKey Takeaways -
Akamai shares jumped Friday after the company signed a new seven-year deal with Claude maker Anthropic.
Wall Street analysts cheered the deal, though some voiced concerns about Akamai’s dependence on Anthropic.
Shares of Akamai are surging after the cloud computing and cybersecurity firm signed a new seven-year deal with Anthropic.
Shares of Akamai (AKAM) were up 8% to $119 in recent trading. The company said late yesterday that it will receive $11.6 billion from Anthropic over the next seven years to “support Anthropic’s accelerating CPU workload demands by leveraging Akamai Cloud’s distributed AI infrastructure and software.”
Anthropic, the maker of the Claude large language models, also received a warrant to buy up to 7.7 million, or roughly 5%, of Akamai’s outstanding shares for $111.33 per share, in total worth about $857.2 million.
Part of the warrant, roughly 2% of Akamai’s outstanding shares, vested in line with yesterday’s announcement. The remaining amount will allow Anthropic to buy another 1% of Akamai’s shares for each $3 billion Anthropic spends beyond the initial deal, giving the agreement a potential value of up to $20 billion.
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JPMorgan analysts raised their price target for Akamai to $167 from $158 following the announcement but kept a neutral rating, writing that they are still looking for “more diversified customer drivers for demand,” as Anthropic now makes up some 93% of Akamai’s $14.4 billion in new deals signed this year.
Oppenheimer analysts, maintaining an “outperform” rating and $180 price target, said the deal “shows that Akamai’s distributed cloud can win frontier AI workloads,” and that they could see Akamai signing similar deals in the future as it builds its compute capacity.
With Friday’s gains, Akamai shares are up nearly 40% from the start of the year.
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Source: “AOL Money”
