Anthropic leases xAI's Colossus 1 (300MW, 220K+ GPUs) and signs $1.8B Akamai cloud deal

Anthropic locked in two major compute commitments: an exclusive lease of xAI's Memphis Colossus 1 supercomputer — 220,000+ NVIDIA H100/H200/GB200 GPUs and ~300MW — and a $1.8B seven-year cloud contract with Akamai that sent Akamai shares up 27%. Both come on top of Anthropic's ~$200B Google Cloud expansion and AWS Trainium 2 commitments. New Street Research estimates the xAI lease is worth $3–4B/year to Musk's lab; CryptoBriefing pegs it higher at $5–6B.