Akamai Shares Jump 7% After Q3 Beat and Record $14 Billion in Cloud Commitments Including Anthropic Deal

Akamai Technologies shares rallied roughly 7% in Friday premarket trading after the company reported solid third-quarter results and disclosed more than $14 billion in multi-year Cloud Infrastructure Services commitments signed so far in 2026, anchored by an $11.6 billion, seven-year agreement with AI company Anthropic. The Anthropic contract, structured to support growing CPU workloads on Akamai's distributed cloud network, also includes a warrant arrangement under which Akamai issues approximately 1% of its common stock for each additional $3 billion Anthropic purchases beyond the base commitment, and a $9 billion option that management said was not factored into 2028 revenue projections.

Cloud Infrastructure Services revenue rose 34% year-over-year to $109 million in Q3, while delivery and other cloud applications revenue fell 3% to $391 million, producing overall revenue growth of 6%. CEO Tom Leighton cited momentum in security and cloud infrastructure as the primary drivers, and also flagged the launch of two new services, Akamai Inference and Akamai Agent Sandbox, designed to let enterprises build and tune AI models on Akamai's platform.

For the fourth quarter, the company guided to revenue of $1.145 billion to $1.170 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.50 to $1.70. Looking further out, management projected Cloud Infrastructure Services revenue of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion in 2027, which would represent more than a doubling from current levels, and guided to 17% to 22% constant-currency overall revenue growth for the full year 2027. Options volume in AKAM shares on Friday was notable, with 23,813 contracts traded, representing approximately 2.4 million underlying shares.