AI lab Anthropic is reportedly behind a massive cloud contract secured by Akamai.

According to Bloomberg, and citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter, the contract is valued at $1.8 billion and will run for seven years.

Akamai disclosed that it had signed "the largest customer deal in Akamai history" during its Q1 2026 earnings call last week.

CEO Frank Thomson Leighton described it only as "a landmark seven-year $1.8 billion commitment for our cloud infrastructure services by a leading frontier model company" and did not name the company behind it. He added that it followed "the $200 million CIS deal we announced in February with a major US tech company also at the forefront of the AI revolution. These leaders in AI have chosen Akamai because their AI workloads need the scale, performance, and reliability that our cloud platform provides."

It has not been disclosed what hardware Anthropic seeks to lease from Akamai. The previously announced $200m deal was for Nvidia Blackwell RTX Pro 6000 Server Edition clusters which are less powerful than other Blackwell GPUs, but better suited to small deployments - which Akamai specializes in.

Earlier this year, Akamai announced plans to deploy thousands of Blackwell GPUs across its infrastructure, later expanding this with the announced "AI Grid" rollout across its 4,400 Edge locations. Using Nvidia's AI Grid reference design, Akamai would deploy Nvidia hardware across its global network of locations. The company said this will enable enterprises to run agentic and physical AI "with the responsiveness of local compute and the scale of the global web."

Anthropic has signed several major cloud and capacity agreements of late. Most recently, it signed on to use the entirety of SpaceX-xAI's Colossus 1 data center, which has some 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, and has signed deals with the likes of Google, Amazon Web Services, and CoreWeave.

After Akamai disclosed the contract win, its shares rose 27 percent the following day.

The cloud and cybersecurity company saw revenues of $1.074bn for the quarter, up six percent Year-on-Year (YoY), for which its Cloud Infrastructure Services business contributed $95m, up 40 percent YoY. Adjusted EBITDA was $427m, a three percent decrease YoY. Income from operations was $114m, down 26 percent YoY and the operating margin down four percentage points to 11 percent.