Anthropic Signs $1.8B Cloud Infrastructure Deal With Akamai, Could Surpass OpenAI's $852B Valuation

According to Bloomberg, Anthropic has signed a $1.8 billion cloud infrastructure contract with Akamai during the company's first-quarter 2026 earnings call. The seven-year agreement marks Akamai's largest customer deal in company history, as confirmed by CEO Frank Thomson Leighton, who described the counterparty as a "leading frontier model company." The contract will expand Anthropic's distributed compute capacity alongside existing agreements with Amazon Web Services, Google, CoreWeave, and SpaceX-linked infrastructure.

The deal underscores Anthropic's rapid scaling as it competes with OpenAI. The company is reportedly seeking a new funding round at a valuation between $900 billion and $1 trillion, which could surpass OpenAI's reported $852 billion valuation from March 2026. Anthropic's valuation has grown sharply from $61.5 billion in March 2025 to $183 billion by September 2025 and $380 billion in February 2026.