Anthropic’s Akamai contract turns AI demand into someone else’s capital plan

September 25, 2026

Anthropic agreed a seven-year, $11.6 billion contract with Akamai for computing power. This is likely to matter beyond the two companies because it turns one model provider’s demand into a supplier’s multiyear build decision, not a burst of rented capacity. It also suggests that AI infrastructure demand is spreading past the usual hyperscale cloud names: if Akamai is willing to spend against a single contract at this scale, buyers now have another route to secure capacity and hardware partners another customer class to build for.

Google launched Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar in Gemini Enterprise, adding low-latency multimodal conversations with a visual avatar. A multimodal conversation means the system handles several kinds of input and output together - here, spoken exchange and live visual presence rather than text alone. We read this less as a feature add than as another step in moving enterprise AI from a chat window to a service surface that can speak, listen and present itself in real time. That widens the comparison set for Microsoft: Copilot and Teams are no longer measured only against text assistants, but against tools that can front customer service, internal help or sales interactions as a live presence.

Google also began piloting Call for Me for U.S. Pixel 11 subscribers, letting Gemini phone local businesses, collect information and report back. The shift here appears to be from helping a user compose a request to letting the system carry out a bounded errand in the real world, over an ordinary phone line that businesses already use. Meta and EssilorLuxottica announced new Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses and audio-only models, with Muse becoming available on the glasses in the U.S. Meta also introduced Muse Charm, a wearable access point for its Muse AI agent. Anthropic published Project Swap, an experiment on Claude-powered agents bargaining and trading books in a controlled marketplace.