Akamai CEO Tom Leighton on the $11.6B Anthropic Deal, Close to $15B of Multiyear Commitments and Why Akamai Doesn't Need Gigawatt Data Centers, on CNBC's Squawk on the Street

The Anthropic agreement

Akamai announced a seven-year, $11.6 billion agreement with Anthropic to support the AI company's growing infrastructure demand, with potential expansion to around $20 billion. As part of the deal, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for up to 5% of its common stock. Leighton declined to detail the specific workloads within this particular deal but described the relationship as reflecting Akamai's standing as a distributed, high-performance provider of compute delivery and security. He characterized the deal as validation of infrastructure investments Akamai has made over the years to support the compute needs of major enterprise applications.

Bookings momentum and revenue timing

Leighton disclosed that Akamai has signed close to $15 billion of multiyear commitments for its cloud infrastructure services so far this year. He said revenue from those commitments will begin showing up in Q4 of this year, then continue ramping through 2028, which he expects will materially accelerate Akamai's overall revenue growth; he gave no separate revenue schedule for the Anthropic agreement on tape.

Workloads and margin structure

Asked what workloads the new cloud business serves, Leighton pointed to physical AI, robotics, interactive media and voice, and tailored consumer experiences (e.g., virtual try-on for online shopping) as enterprises adopt AI broadly. On profitability, he addressed analyst concern that this business could dilute margins: Akamai currently operates in the mid-20s margin range because new large deals carry upfront CapEx and colocation costs in their first six months, but the business becomes accretive to overall margins in steady state — a transition he expects to materialize within a couple of years, timing dependent on growth pace.

Infrastructure strategy vs. bottlenecks

Leighton distinguished Akamai's approach from competitors chasing gigawatt-scale data centers requiring lengthy approvals. Akamai instead takes a comparatively small footprint within many existing data centers around the world, with even a large point of presence sized at just 10-20 megawatts, spread across 4,000 points of presence in 700 cities — a structure he says makes capacity deployment materially easier and faster than the large-scale buildout model.

Cycle comparison and AI risk

Leighton drew a direct parallel between the current AI moment and the internet's rise in the late 1990s, calling AI likely to be equally important and impactful. Pressed on rogue AI agents, he called the risk concerning but avoided aligning with a "doomer" framing, instead emphasizing that the industry must build guardrails and security to keep agents constrained and to defend critical infrastructure — an extension of cyberattack threats that have existed for as long as the internet itself, now amplified by more powerful tools in attackers' hands. He noted Akamai's cybersecurity business is central to this defense.

Remaining upside and deal structure

On the roughly $9 billion of additional potential business beyond the initial $11.6 billion, Leighton said there are no specific thresholds required to trigger it — expansion depends simply on mutual decision to proceed. The warrant structure is designed to create economic incentive and keep both companies aligned as more of that business materializes, with additional warrants vesting as it does.