TL;DR Akamai disclosed a 1.8 billion dollar, seven-year cloud deal with Anthropic, its largest contract ever. The stock rose 27 per cent in a day as the CDN company’s AI cloud pivot received its most significant validation. Akamai Technologies disclosed a 1.8 billion dollar, seven-year cloud infrastructure deal with a customer it described only as “ a leading frontier model provider. ” Bloomberg identified the customer as Anthropic. The stock rose 27 per cent in a single day, the largest rally in the company’s 28-year history. A company that built its business delivering web pages faster than anyone else just became an AI infrastructure provider on the strength of one contract. The deal is the centrepiece of a quarter in which Akamai’s cloud infrastructure services revenue grew 40 per cent year over year to 95 million dollars, while its legacy content delivery business declined 7 per cent.…