|
|
|
May 11, 2026
|
|
|
|
|
Supported by
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Welcome back! Anthropic signs a $1.8 billion cloud deal with Akamai. The hedge fund TCI cuts almost all of its $8 billion stake in Microsoft. Dan Levine, a partner at Accel known for his investments in Scale AI and Vercel, is stepping back from the VC firm.
|
|
|
|
Anthropic is the unnamed customer behind a $1.8 billion cloud deal that Akamai announced on Thursday, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. That deal sent the content delivery network provider’s stock soaring 27% on Friday. The seven-year cloud contract—which Akamai disclosed Thursday without naming the customer—is the largest in the company’s history. Executives described the customer only as a “leading frontier model company.” The agreement marks an early validation of Akamai’s push into the booming market for renting Nvidia GPUs to AI developers. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company is betting that its sprawling network of smaller data centers located near major population hubs can help it carve out a role in AI inference. Developers increasingly want AI computing power located
closer to end users to reduce latency. Bloomberg first reported on the deal. It’s not clear what kind of GPUs Anthropic will rent from Akamai. Akamai announced a $200 million cloud deal in February, which involved renting out chips called RTX Pros that are a part of Nvidia’s Blackwell family of GPUs. Those chips have less horsepower than the Blackwell GPUs most AI developers use, but could be better suited for smaller data centers. “We are seeing a very strong pipeline with some very large opportunities—some customers that want to start with a couple hundred GPUs, some that want to start with a thousand or more,” Akamai CEO Tom Leighton said on the company’s earnings call.
|
|
|
|
The hedge fund TCI cut almost all of its $8 billion stake in Microsoft, the Financial Times reported Friday, due to what CEO Christopher Hohn described in an investor letter as “uncertainty over Microsoft’s competitive position in the future” as AI threatens to replace existing software like Office. TCI, which reduced its position in Microsoft from 10% to 1%, also noted “risks” facing Microsoft’s Azure cloud unit, the FT reported. Azure revenue accelerated in the first quarter of 2026, but some investors have been spooked by Microsoft’s disclosure that a single customer—OpenAI—made up
more than 40% of its Azure revenue backlog. Microsoft shares were down more than 1% on Friday. The company’s shares have slid roughly 12% since the start of the year as investors worry AI could disrupt its business.
|
|
|
|
Dan Levine, a partner at Accel known for early startup investments in Scale AI and Vercel, is stepping back from the venture capital firm and will no longer make new investments for it, people familiar with the matter said. The firm disclosed the change to limited partners in recent weeks. It told them Levine may do personal investing or raise his own fund in the future, and would likely become the firm’s fourth emeritus partner. It told LPs “no specific disagreement or incident” led to the stepback. He is still a partner and will remain in his board seats, which include data labeling firm Scale and developer tools startups Vercel and Sentry, according to his LinkedIn page. He also led the firm’s investment into Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab last year. Levine, 38, first joined Accel as an associate in 2010, before a stint at Dropbox. His most lucrative investment came in 2016 when he led Scale’s earliest round of funding and let its cofounders work out of his Mission District home. The startup last year sold a 49% stake to Meta, netting Accel roughly $2 billion.
|
|
|
|
Apple has reached “a preliminary agreement” with Intel in recent months for manufacturing some of its chips, The Wall Street Journal reported. Earlier, this week Bloomberg reported that Apple was exploring such a partnership with Intel and Samsung. A deal with one of the companies would help Apple diversify some of its chip manufacturing away from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which Apple has relied on for more than a decade to produce its chips. Apple has been dealing with chip supply constraints, holding back sales for its latest iPhones and some versions of the Mac, the company said for its March quarterly earnings. Intel is attempting to draw in external customers for its chip fabrication business under new CEO Lip-Bu Tan. The company’s stock rose more than 15% today on the news.
|
|
|
|
Salesforce’s chief communications officer Carolyn Guss is leaving the sales software giant, according to two people familiar with the matter. One of the people said Guss is joining a new company and that Salesforce will be appointing another chief communications officer soon. Among her responsibilities, Guss handled communications for CEO Marc Benioff, who has made headlines over the past year for saying AI allowed him to cut thousands of customer service roles and that President Trump should deploy the National Guard in San Francisco, though he later backed off the idea. Guss is one of a number of executives to leave Salesforce in recent months, including Eric Eyken-Sluyters, who spent two decades at the company and oversaw its Agentforce AI tools for a period. He joined Sierra, a young Salesforce rival in customer
service automation. Kaylin Voss, who was executive vice president of Agentforce, left for OpenAI last month. Multiple executives who worked on Agentforce have left for Anthropic. Salesforce stock has dropped roughly 30% this year as investors have worried that new AI tools from Anthropic and OpenAI as well as the rise of startups such as Sierra could slow Salesforce’s growth. The company has responded by changing how it charges businesses to use its own AI features and launching a suite of tools called Headless 360 that allow customers to use external AI agents to interact with Salesforce apps.
|
|
|
|
| |
