Akamai's $11.6 Billion Anthropic Deal Pushes the AI Ledger Past $900B

TL;DR

• Akamai just signed the AI Compute Deal Ledger's first CPU-only row. A September 24 SEC filing discloses $11.6 billion of contractual commitment over seven years for Anthropic's workloads on Akamai's distributed cloud, with an option for up to $9 billion more. Every other row on this ledger runs on GPUs.
• Atlas Energy Solutions adds a second new row, a September 25 filing disclosing 283 MW of Caterpillar power-generation equipment reimbursed by an unnamed "leading frontier AI lab." No dollar figure was disclosed anywhere in the primary filing, so the row qualifies on megawatts alone.
• Running totals: $900.1 billion binding on 13.68 GW, up from $888.5 billion and 13.40 GW last week, on two new binding rows.
• The EDGAR watchlist turned up 18 filings this week and zero deals. Everything real came from a general web sweep instead: Akamai's own filing, and Atlas Energy's.
• Three items moved to the candidate queue rather than becoming rows: an unverified aggregate dollar figure on the Atlas deal, Nscale's own project-finance debt for its Texas and North Carolina campuses, and a newly reported $5.5 billion OpenAI warrant inside SB Energy's IPO filing.

The Board

Every other row on this ledger is a GPU deal. This week's biggest addition is not.

Akamai's CPU Bet on Anthropic

Akamai spent two decades building a content-delivery network, the plumbing that gets web pages and video to browsers fast. On September 24 it filed an 8-K disclosing a very different kind of customer: Anthropic, committing $11.6 billion over seven years to run AI workloads on Akamai's cloud.

The number that separates this deal from the rest of the ledger is not the size. It is the chip. Every capacity lease, cloud contract and chip purchase already on this dataset, Oracle's $300 billion OpenAI contract, Nvidia's $105 billion Ohio guarantee, AMD's 2 GW Anthropic deployment, runs on GPUs. Akamai's filing states the commitment supports Anthropic's CPU workload demand. Inference for smaller models, data preprocessing and orchestration work do not need a GPU's parallel math, and a cloud provider whose whole business was built on distributed, CPU-based edge infrastructure is a plausible seller for exactly that slice of the AI buildout.

The filing gives the deal a full shape beyond the headline number. Revenue starts in the second half of 2027. By the end of 2028, Akamai expects it to reach roughly $1.7 billion a year.

Building that capacity costs Akamai money too. The company expects to spend about $5.5 billion of its own capital, $1.7 billion of that landing in 2026. That capex is Akamai's own cost to deliver the contract, separate from the deal's value.

There is also an incentive on top, paid the other direction. Akamai granted Anthropic a warrant for 7.7 million shares of non-voting convertible preferred stock, roughly 5% of Akamai's outstanding common stock on an as-converted basis, at a $111.33 strike. About 2% of that vests with the base $11.6 billion commitment. The rest vests in tranches as Anthropic exercises its option for up to $9 billion more, which the company describes as bringing the total potential relationship toward $20 billion. Add the base and the option precisely and the arithmetic comes to $20.6 billion. That is close enough to the rounded figure to read as a soundbite rather than a discrepancy.

Only the $11.6 billion base commitment counts toward this ledger's binding total. The $9 billion option is real upside, but it is not signed yet. It sits in the row's max_with_options_usd field instead, the same treatment Hut 8's Beacon Point renewal options and Nvidia's discretionary Ohio expansion already get.

Atlas Energy Solutions: 283 Megawatts, No Named Customer, No Disclosed Price

The second new row is smaller in profile but structurally interesting. On September 25, Atlas Energy Solutions, a Texas frac-sand and power company, disclosed a deal with an unnamed "leading frontier AI lab." Two Atlas subsidiaries signed cost-reimbursement agreements with the lab, tied to equipment purchase agreements for 283 MW of Caterpillar natural-gas generation equipment. That capacity supports one specific data center project's initial power ramp.

That 283 MW is the only figure this ledger could confirm from a primary source. Several finance-aggregator sites reported an aggregate $613.5 million value for the two reimbursement agreements, split roughly $340.5 million and $273 million. I pulled Atlas's own 8-K and its press-release exhibit directly from EDGAR. Neither document states a dollar figure anywhere. The scale check has no primary number to check against, so the row goes in with value: null. It qualifies on capacity alone, the same 50 MW-or-more path already used for Applied Digital's undisclosed-hyperscaler rows. If a tier-1 outlet or a later Atlas filing confirms the dollar figure, the row updates.

A separate 328 MW Caterpillar purchase mentioned alongside this announcement is not included in the row's capacity. Reporting describes it as fulfilling Atlas's pre-existing equipment framework with Caterpillar rather than this specific AI-lab reimbursement, and conflating the two would overstate what one customer actually committed to.

What Stayed in the Candidate Queue

Nscale's own project financing. An S-1 exhibit surfaced a $1.422 billion credit agreement backing Nscale's GPU-collateralized debt, part of a roughly $3 billion financing closed August 31 for two of its own US campuses (Ward County, Texas and Madison County, North Carolina). This is money Nscale borrowed to build its own infrastructure, not a contract with a named compute customer, and the ledger's inclusion criteria explicitly exclude internal capex programs with no counterparty. Whether project debt for a company's own buildout belongs on a compute-deal ledger at all is a scope question that goes beyond sourcing, so it stays flagged for a decision rather than forced into a row.

A $5.5 billion OpenAI warrant inside SB Energy's IPO filing. SB Energy's own S-1, the filing already ledgered through the Nvidia Ohio guarantee row, reportedly discloses SB Energy granting OpenAI warrants worth about $5.5 billion to help secure it as the tenant across 17 separate leases. That would be an unusual instrument for this dataset: a landlord paying a tenant, the reverse of every other compute_equity row here. It surfaced only through secondary aggregator coverage this week; the filing itself was too large to pull directly in this session. It needs the S-1's own warrant language and a tier-1 confirmation before it becomes a row.

What Else Got Reviewed and Passed On

Eighteen EDGAR watchlist filings came due this week. Six were routine corporate housekeeping: two SharonAI auditor changes, a CoreWeave convertible-notes offering, an Apollo investor presentation, a Galaxy Digital accounting-officer transition, and a Blackstone preliminary revenue estimate. The other twelve were S-1 or S-1/A filings from blank-check SPACs and infrastructure builders: Nscale, SB Energy, ConnectM (twice), Haymaker, Accelevation, Stark Focus Group, KiNRG, AEI CapForce, Southport and SeeQC. Every one of them named no deal, no counterparty, or no figure over the ledger's $100 million threshold.

None of the eighteen produced a row on its own. The two additions this week both came from a general web sweep instead, which is the more common pattern most weeks. The watchlist catches the obvious filers. The actual news usually breaks in a press release the watchlist was never built to see.

The One-Line Read

Akamai's first large AI contract runs on CPUs instead of GPUs, and it alone accounts for the entire $11.6 billion this ledger's binding total grew by this week.

Sources: Akamai's September 24 Form 8-K and press-release exhibit, Bloomberg and TechCrunch reporting on the same terms, and Atlas Energy Solutions's September 25 Form 8-K and press-release exhibit. Every figure links to its row in the full ledger, browsable per company on pages like Akamai's entity record and Anthropic's. The full methodology, including every open candidate, is on the methodology page. The last ledger update, covering SB Energy's IPO backlog disclosure, is here.