Anthropic signed an $11.6bn, seven-year deal for CPU capacity on Akamai’s distributed cloud infrastructure, with the potential to expand by another $9bn, taking the total opportunity to around $20bn. In layman’s terms Akamai is renting Anthropic a huge amount of computing capacity — not GPU chips used to train frontier models, but CPU-based cloud infrastructure spread across Akamai’s global network. The agreement is roughly six times larger than Anthropic’s May contract with Akamai and helps explain the renewed interest in CPU, edge and distributed cloud names after the Muse/Instinct-led agentic AI rally. It does come with heavy capital intensity, including around $5.5bn of capex tied to the deal and roughly $1.7bn of additional 2026 spend to secure key supply-chain components such as memory, but the read-through is clear: frontier model demand is spreading across the infrastructure stack, and Akamai is now being treated as a more credible AI-capacity beneficiary: GS