Anthropic's major deal ignites stock price; Akamai opens up over 14% in US stocks.

Akamai gapped up at the open and, as of press time, was up more than 14%. On the news front, Akamai announced a major expansion of its partnership with Anthropic, securing a seven-year, $11.6 billion contract commitment from the AI company, marking another massive deal in the AI computing infrastructure space. This partnership will profoundly reshape Akamai's business structure. Alongside expectations of massive capital expenditures, the company's cloud computing revenue is expected to surge in the coming years and may soon surpass its traditional cybersecurity and content delivery businesses. According to the announcement, Akamai will support Anthropic's rapidly growing CPU workload demands through the distributed AI infrastructure and software of its cloud business. There is room for the partnership to expand further. Akamai disclosed that the deal allows for future additional expansion of up to $9 billion, bringing the potential total commitment to approximately $20 billion.