Wall Street edges higher as Akamai jumps after Anthropic deal

Wall Street’s main indices opened modestly higher on Friday 25 September. ANP attributed the gains to continued enthusiasm for artificial intelligence shares, which it said was temporarily outweighing concerns about high oil prices and rising government-bond yields. [1]

Shortly after the opening, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.3% at 51,478 points. The S&P 500 gained 0.2% to 7,721, while the technology-heavy Nasdaq rose 0.2% to 26,997. The gains were not uniform among AI-linked companies: Meta shares fell 2.9%. [1]

Akamai jumps after cloud-computing agreement

Akamai shares rose 13% in early trading after the company announced an expanded agreement with Anthropic the previous day. [1]

The arrangement involves approximately $11.6 billion in contractual commitments for dedicated cloud-computing capacity and related support. Akamai said the capacity would support Anthropic’s growing CPU workloads. The two project plans each have an initial seven-year term, starting when their respective services begin. [2] [3]

Anthropic’s payment commitment is subject to delivery and service-availability requirements, as well as contractual termination provisions. [3]

The agreement also requires substantial investment. Akamai estimated associated capital expenditure at about $5.5 billion, including an anticipated $1.7 billion increase in its 2026 capital spending to secure components such as memory. The company said it expected no change to its 2026 revenue guidance. [2]