Shares of Akamai surge after deal with Anthropic. What Wall Street is saying
Cloud provider and cybersecurity company Akamai is the toast of Wall Street on Friday following the signing of an $11.6 billion deal with frontier artificial intelligence platform Anthropic for added computing capacity over the next seven years. Akamai shares briefly soared as much as 16.4% to $128.46 before paring the gain to about 8%. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Akamai is ahead 36% in 2026, although almost all of the gain came in the first quarter. AKAM 5D mountain Akamai over the past five days The new computing power will aim at central processing units (CPUs) rather than graphics processing units (GPUs), and there’s an option to broaden out the hardware terms of the deal and raise it to a total of $20 billion. Networks of CPUs are generally better for the types of coordinated computing tasks required for agentic AI, many technologists say. Analysts at Oppenheimer calculated in a Friday note that the deal is worth about 77 megawatts of computing power, though they noted that Akamai has not put specific numbers on the power requirement. Akamai has to build out its own capacity to fulfill the contract requirements, and the deal is expected to result in $5.5 billion in capital spending. The company has $14.6 billion in total cloud commitments signed year-to-date, and analysts predict healthy profit margins for that business. “We estimate the EBIT Margin for the $14.6B in [cloud infrastructure services] commitments signed YTD is ~30% at full revenue run-rate,” Rudy Kessinger at DA Davidson said in report Friday. Morgan Stanley: Overweight, $165 “The bookings momentum with CIS increasingly validates the thesis that the structural growth profile for Akamai is materially improving. Using the midpoint of the of management’s commentary that this latest deal will add between $150 and $300 million in 2027 implies that our revenue growth estimates should increase from 12.5% in our current model to ~16%. This compares to just 5% revenue growth the company reported in 2025.” Piper Sandler: Overweight, $158 “The deal can be expanded to up to $20B, and includes Anthropic taking a stake in Akamai. While we had been expecting large deals to come in, the magnitude of this one is impressive and drastically changes the financial profile, as we see Akamai becoming a ‘hypergrowth’ asset from a ‘value’ asset with CIS on- pace to surpass even Security by no later than 4Q28 at this pace. We don’t believe Akamai is done in executing large CPU or GPU based deals, and we continue to want to own the acceleration and transition towards higher-growth Compute.” DA Davidson: Buy, $185 “AKAM will be providing dedicated cloud computing capacity and related managed support services, specifically to support Anthropic’s accelerating CPU workload demands. The Master Services Agreement (MSA) is split into Projects, w/ this new commitment representing Project 2 & Project 3 of the Anthropic MSA. Beyond the Anthropic deal, AKAM delivered a larger vision for Akamai Cloud. They shared some of the ways CIS is being used today, including conversational voice agents, robotics & physical AI, real-time virtual world generation & rendering for simulations, real-time AI video intelligence for CCTV feeds, and more.” Oppenheimer: Outperform, $180 “At the portfolio average of ~$22M in annual revenue per MW, Anthropic’s ~$1.7B contracted run-rate implies ~77MW for the new deal (although Akamai has not disclosed its deal-specific power requirement). That puts the ~$5.5B CapEx build at ~$70M/MW. The $1.7B memory pre-buy is part of that build, or ~$22M/MW, with the remaining CapEx of ~$3.8B at ~$49M/MW.” Evercore ISI: Outperform, $175 “This reinforces the multi-year rev reacceleration thesis we laid out in our prior CIS deep dive (note here), with the contribution from this deal, alongside other large CIS wins, supporting further acceleration in CY28. We’d also note the Anthropic partnership does not preclude AKAM from working with other frontier labs, which could support additional AI wins over time.”
