AKAM’s $11.6B Anthropic Deal Has Wall Street Rethinking The Stock — What Analysts See

• Morgan Stanley expects Akamai’s revenue growth to reach about 16%, up from 5% in 2025.
• DA Davidson says demand is building across AI workloads, including robotics, voice agents, and real-time video.
• Oppenheimer estimates Akamai could spend about $5.5 billion to build the capacity needed for the deal.

Akamai Technologies (AKAM) is drawing strong attention on Wall Street after signing an $11.6 billion deal with frontier artificial intelligence platform Anthropic for additional computing capacity over the next seven years. Shares briefly jumped around 14% in morning trade before paring the gains to about 5% at the time of writing on Friday.

Morgan Stanley Sees Faster Growth

Morgan Stanley maintained an Overweight rating and a $165 price target on Akamai. The firm said bookings momentum in Cloud Infrastructure Services increasingly validates the view that Akamai’s structural growth profile is improving.

Based on management’s expectation that the latest deal could add between $150 million and $300 million in 2027, Morgan Stanley expects Akamai’s revenue growth estimates to rise from 12.5% to about 16%. That compares with 5% revenue growth reported in 2025.

DA Davidson Highlights AI Workloads

DA Davidson maintained a Buy rating and a $185 price target. The firm said Akamai will provide dedicated cloud computing capacity and related managed support services to support Anthropic’s accelerating CPU workload demands.

The firm also highlighted Akamai Cloud’s broader applications, including conversational voice agents, robotics and physical AI, real-time virtual world generation and rendering for simulations, and real-time AI video intelligence for CCTV feeds.

Oppenheimer Estimates $5.5B CapEx

Oppenheimer maintained an Outperform rating and a $180 price target. The firm estimates that Anthropic’s roughly $1.7 billion contracted run-rate implies about 77 megawatts of capacity, based on an average of about $22 million in annual revenue per megawatt.

That would put Akamai’s planned $5.5 billion capital expenditure build at about $70 million per megawatt. Oppenheimer said the $1.7 billion memory pre-buy accounts for part of that build, with the remaining capital spending estimated at about $3.8 billion.

UBS, RBC Raise Their Targets

UBS raised its price target on Akamai to $148 from $143 while maintaining a Neutral rating.

RBC Capital kept its Sector Perform rating and $135 price target. The firm called Cloud Infrastructure Services momentum encouraging, saying the Anthropic agreement further validates Akamai’s AI infrastructure strategy and meaningfully expands its addressable opportunity.

RBC also said the deal is boosting its revenue and capital expenditure estimates based on the agreement's economics and continued sales execution, while adding that the risk-reward on the stock looks balanced.

Guggenheim Sees $20B Potential

Guggenheim raised its price target to $225 from $190 and maintained a Buy rating. The firm said Akamai’s relationship with Anthropic now includes $11.6 billion of contractual commitments.

AKAM Stock: Stocktwits Retail Views

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment for AKAM improved to ‘extremely bullish’ from ‘bullish’ in the past 24 hours, while message volume was ‘extremely high.’

AKAM stock has gained over 30% year-to-date. 

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