Akamai's largest single buyer ever revealed: Anthropic signs $1.8 billion long-term agreement for inference, shares surge 27%

According to Beating monitoring, Akamai announced an $1.8 billion seven-year cloud services order on Thursday, setting a company record. At the time, the company only revealed that the buyer was a "leading frontier model company." It was later confirmed that this client is Anthropic.

This substantial order validates Akamai's route into the AI inference market. Unlike traditional centralized large-scale computing power, Akamai's strategy is to build small data centers close to densely populated areas, bringing computing power closer to end users and thereby reducing model response latency.

It is not yet clear which GPU Anthropic rented this time. For reference, Akamai announced a $200 million order in February this year, mainly renting out NVIDIA RTX Pro chips. Although the computing power of this chip (part of the Blackwell family) is lower than the mainstream standard version Blackwell GPUs, it is more suitable for deployment in small data centers.