Akamai announced an $1.8 billion seven-year cloud services order on Thursday, the largest in company history. The stock surged 27% on Friday. At the time, the company only disclosed that the buyer was a "leading frontier model company" — later confirmed to be Anthropic.
The mammoth deal validates Akamai's bet on the AI inference market. Unlike traditional centralized mega-clusters, Akamai's strategy is to build small data centers near dense population centers, bringing compute closer to end users to reduce model response latency.
It's not yet clear which GPUs Anthropic is renting. For reference, Akamai announced a $200 million order in February, primarily leasing Nvidia's RTX Pro chips. That chip, part of the Blackwell family, offers less raw compute than the standard Blackwell GPU used in mainstream deployments, but is better suited for small data centers.