Akamai, the content delivery and cybersecurity specialist, has inked an era-defining deal with AI giant Anthropic, worth $11.6 billion over seven years. The agreement could even expand by another $9 billion, taking the potential commitment to around $20 billion. Digging into the technical details of the agreement, Anthropic’s immediate interest is less glamorous than the AI industry’s GPU arms race. The deal is designed to support Anthropic’s accelerating CPU workload demands, using Akamai Cloud’s distributed infrastructure and software. While this AI infrastructure deal differs from some of the usual mega-contracts built around enormous GPU clusters, that doesn’t mean it isn’t directly relevant to streaming, personalization, and edge processing. The attraction for Anthropic is Akamai’s distribution. The company has more than 4,400 points of presence (PoPs) globally, allowing workloads to be pushed…