AI lab Anthropic is reportedly behind a massive cloud contract secured by Akamai.

According to Bloomberg, and citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter, the contract is valued at $1.8 billion and will run for seven years.

Akamai disclosed that it had signed "the largest customer deal in Akamai history" during its first-quarter (Q1) earnings call last week.

CEO Frank Thomson Leighton described it only as "a landmark seven-year $1.8 billion commitment for our cloud infrastructure services by a leading frontier model company" and did not name the company behind it. Thomson added that it followed the "the $200 million CIS deal we announced in February with a major U.S. tech company also at the forefront of the AI revolution. These leaders in AI have chosen Akamai because their AI workloads need the scale, performance, and reliability that our cloud platform provides."

It has not been disclosed what hardware Anthropic seeks to lease from Akamai. The previously announced $200 million deal was for Nvidia Blackwell RTX Pro 6000 Server Edition clusters, which are less powerful than other Blackwell GPUs, but better suited to small deployments – which Akamai specializes in.

Akamai earlier this week announced plans to deploy thousands of Blackwell GPUs across its infrastructure, later expanding this with the announced "AI Grid" rollout across its 4,400 Edge locations. Using Nvidia's AI Grid reference design, Akamai would deploy Nvidia hardware across its global network of locations. The company said this will enable enterprises to run agentic and physical AI "with the responsiveness of local compute and the scale of the global web."

Anthropic has signed several major cloud and capacity agreements of late. Most recently it signed on to use the entirety of SpaceX-xAI's Colossus 1 data center, which has some 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, and has signed deals with the likes of Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and CoreWeave.

Akamai reported nearly $1.1 billion in Q1 revenues, which was a 6% year-over-year increase. Its Cloud Infrastructure Services business contributed $95 million of that revenue, which was up 40% over the previous year. Income from operations was $114 million, down 26% year over year, with operating margins down four percentage points to 11%.