2026-09-27

Akamai (AKAM) Stock Jumps 16% on $11.6 Billion Anthropic Deal - Could Grow to $20 Billion, But JPMorgan Flags Customer Concentration

Written & reviewed by the TradeSmrt editorial team · 2026-09-27

In this article

What Happened
Why the Market Reacted This Way - Akamai's Business Transformation
What Wall Street Is Saying - Higher Targets, With Caveats
What to Take Away From This
FAQ
Sources

What Happened

Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), the content-delivery and cloud-security company, saw its shares spike as much as 16.4% intraday on Friday, September 25, touching $128.46, before giving back a chunk of those gains to close near $115 - still up roughly 4-5% from Thursday's close around $110. The catalyst was a blockbuster cloud computing agreement with AI lab Anthropic.

Akamai confirmed a seven-year, $11.6 billion contract to supply Anthropic with computing capacity through its Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) unit - the largest single deal in the company's history. Under an expansion clause, the agreement could grow by another $9 billion if Anthropic buys additional capacity, pushing the total potential value to roughly $20 billion.

The deal also carries an unusual sweetener: Akamai granted Anthropic warrants to purchase up to 5% of Akamai's outstanding stock at $111.33 a share. About 2 percentage points of that stake are exercisable immediately, with an additional percentage point unlocking for every $3 billion Anthropic spends under the contract. It's a structure that's becoming increasingly common in AI infrastructure deals - vendor financing dressed up as an equity partnership, aligning the customer's incentives with the supplier's stock price.

Why the Market Reacted This Way - Akamai's Business Transformation

To understand why a single contract could move Akamai's stock by double digits, it helps to look at what's happening beneath the surface of its business. Akamai built its name on content delivery networks (CDNs) - the infrastructure that caches and speeds up websites globally. That legacy "Delivery" segment, though, has been stuck in structural decline for years, squeezed by competition, falling per-unit pricing, and large customers building CDN capacity in-house. It still generated $1.26 billion of Akamai's $4.208 billion in total 2025 revenue - about 30% of the total - but it's no longer a growth engine for the company.

The growth story now sits in Security and Cloud Computing. Security revenue rose 10% to $2.24 billion in 2025, becoming Akamai's single largest segment, while Cloud Computing revenue grew 12% to $708 million. The real acceleration, though, is inside Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) - the GPU-rental, AI-workload business - which posted 40% year-over-year revenue growth in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Akamai has guided for CIS growth of 50% or more in 2026, positioning the segment to drive double-digit total revenue growth by 2027. Friday's deal with Anthropic is being read on Wall Street as concrete proof that this growth thesis is real: Piper Sandler analysts said the deal's magnitude "drastically changes [Akamai's] financial profile," potentially re-rating the stock from a "value" name into a "hypergrowth" one.

This wasn't the start of the relationship, either. Back in May 2026, Akamai's stock jumped 20% in a single day on news of a separate seven-year, $1.8 billion CIS contract with what the company described only as "a leading frontier model provider" - almost certainly Anthropic, given the timing and structure. Friday's $11.6 billion agreement looks like a dramatic expansion of that earlier relationship rather than an entirely new customer win, which is itself a meaningful data point: the two companies' commercial ties have deepened sharply in just a few months.

What Wall Street Is Saying - Higher Targets, With Caveats

Within hours of the announcement, several major banks raised their price targets. Morgan Stanley kept its Overweight rating and $165 target while lifting its 2027 revenue growth forecast from 12.5% to roughly 16%. Guggenheim raised its target to $225 from $190, reiterating a Buy rating. JPMorgan moved its target to $167 from $158, and Piper Sandler jumped its target to $158 from $125. Oppenheimer held its Outperform rating and $180 target steady.

The optimism wasn't unanimous, though. Even as JPMorgan raised its target, its analysts flagged a need for "more diversified customer drivers for demand" - a polite way of pointing out that Anthropic now accounts for roughly 93% of the $14.4 billion in new CIS contracts Akamai has signed so far in 2026. That's an extraordinary degree of customer concentration: if Anthropic's spending plans or business trajectory ever shift, Akamai's growth story would take a direct hit. It's essentially the same risk structure that hammered Datadog (DDOG) shares by roughly 17% in a single day earlier this year, when investors grew worried about the company's dependence on OpenAI as a customer.

There's also a financing question hanging over the deal. Akamai expects to spend roughly $5.5 billion in capital expenditures to build out the infrastructure this contract requires, including $1.7 billion this year alone. JPMorgan analysts flagged the possibility that Akamai may need to tap capital markets again next year to fund that buildout - a dynamic that echoes concerns raised elsewhere in the AI infrastructure space, including Oracle's recent force majeure notice tied to its Project Jupiter data center buildout.

What to Take Away From This

The headline percentage move and the number that survives to the close can differ sharply. AKAM spiked 16.4% intraday but closed up only about 4-5%. Check the closing price action, not just the biggest number in a headline, before drawing conclusions.
A single mega-deal can re-rate a stock's growth story - and simultaneously concentrate its risk. Don't just look at how fast revenue is growing; look at how many customers are actually driving that growth. Datadog's OpenAI-concentration scare is a useful cautionary precedent here.
Warrant-linked vendor deals cut both ways. Giving a customer the right to buy stock cheaply aligns incentives between supplier and buyer, but it also sets up future dilution for existing shareholders as those warrants get exercised over time.
A big contract number isn't the whole picture - check the capex and financing that comes with it. Look past the top-line deal size to the capital spending required to actually deliver it, and whether the company can fund that buildout without further share issuance.

FAQ

How big is the Akamai-Anthropic deal, exactly?

The base contract is worth $11.6 billion over seven years. If Anthropic buys additional capacity, the deal can expand by up to $9 billion more, for a total potential value of around $20 billion.

Why did AKAM stock give back most of its intraday gain?

The initial spike reflected excitement over the deal's sheer size, but as the trading day went on, investors and analysts weighed in on the flip side - heavy customer concentration in Anthropic and the capital Akamai will need to spend to fulfill the contract - which pulled back some of the early gain.

How concentrated is Akamai's exposure to Anthropic?

According to JPMorgan, Anthropic accounts for about 93% of the $14.4 billion in new Cloud Infrastructure Services contracts Akamai has signed so far in 2026. That's a very high level of customer concentration for any company's core growth business.

Is this similar to other AI infrastructure deals we've seen this year?

Structurally, yes. A large AI company signs a multi-year capacity deal with an infrastructure provider, the provider's stock jumps, and then questions follow about the capital spending and financing needed to actually deliver on the contract - a pattern that has recurred across several AI infrastructure deals in 2026.

Sources

This article is an original synthesis and analysis based on the reporting below, not a reproduction of the original articles. Please verify the latest figures and details directly with the source reporting.

⚠️ This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Market conditions change constantly - always verify the latest information before making investment decisions.