Akamai jumps on an $11.6 billion Anthropic deal as the AI trade reaches beyond GPUs

The biggest single-stock story before Friday's open does not involve a chipmaker. Akamai Technologies, a company best known for the networks that help websites and streaming services deliver content quickly, climbed more than 20% in early pre-market trading. One pre-market data feed showed the stock up about 21%.

The catalyst is a contract with Anthropic, the artificial-intelligence developer. According to pre-market reports, Anthropic signed a seven-year agreement worth $11.6 billion to run computing workloads on Akamai's infrastructure. The same reports said expansion options could lift the total value of the arrangement to as much as $20 billion.

Why the deal stands out

For most of the AI buildout, investor attention has centered on graphics processors, the specialized chips used to train large AI models. The Akamai agreement is a reminder that running AI products at scale requires much more than GPUs. Once a model is deployed, it needs distributed computing capacity, networking and storage close to users. Reports described the Anthropic contract as focused on CPU workloads, the general-purpose processing that surrounds and supports AI applications.

The size of the deal also matters relative to the company. A multiyear commitment in the billions of dollars from a single customer can change how investors think about a company's growth profile, which helps explain the magnitude of the pre-market move. At the same time, contracts of this kind are typically recognized over many years, and the details of how revenue will be booked have not been laid out in the reports.

The broader chip move

Akamai was not alone. AI hardware stocks were broadly higher in pre-market trading, with Nvidia, Broadcom, Micron, Marvell and Advanced Micro Devices all showing gains, according to pre-market data. AMD extended a rally that had already carried it to a 52-week high, as some analysts argued that AI agent products such as Meta's Muse could require far more CPUs relative to GPUs than earlier AI systems. Intel also moved up alongside the sector.

That thread connects to Thursday's session. Meta Platforms rose about 4.5% on Thursday, helping the Nasdaq Composite recover from an earlier decline, as investors continued to react to the company's Muse AI agent and a new set of AI devices unveiled this week.

The AI trade is widening from the chips that train models to the infrastructure that runs them every day.

Bloom Energy and Oracle

A separate pre-market mover ties back to one of Thursday's biggest concerns. Oracle shares slipped on Thursday after a report about a force majeure notice tied to its data center plans, a development that raised questions about the pace of the AI infrastructure buildout. On Friday, Bloom Energy said Oracle remains committed to a 2.4-gigawatt fuel-cell contract for Project Jupiter, according to pre-market reports, which eased some worries about the energy side of Oracle's buildout. Bloom shares rose a little over 1% in early pre-market trading.

Power supply has become one of the defining constraints on AI data centers, and companies that generate electricity on-site have attracted interest as a result. Any sign that a large project is slowing tends to ripple through that group, so Bloom's statement was closely watched.

What to keep in mind

Pre-market moves can shrink or grow once regular trading begins and volume picks up. That is especially true on a morning when the Treasury market remains the dominant force. The 10-year yield is sitting near levels last seen in 2007, and higher yields have tended to weigh on growth stocks whose valuations depend on profits expected far in the future.

The Akamai reaction shows how much the market still rewards concrete evidence of AI demand. Whether that enthusiasm can hold up against rising borrowing costs is one of the questions Friday's session will help answer.