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networks
Machine-generated traffic to surge 1000x in five years, while we meatbags keep clicking away slowly
Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert has run the numbers on internet traffic trends and predicted that human-generated packets will soon account for a trivial amount of overall traffic.
The internet-grooming company has previously predicted that machine-generated traffic would exceed human-generated throughput in 2027 – but got that wrong because its measurements found machines took over in May 2026.
During the company’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday, Seifert stuck his neck out again with a new prediction.
“To give you a sense of how this trend is playing out, and with the big caveat that I have called it wrong at every point along the way, if the current trends continue, we think in five years, non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic,” he said.
“In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that’s just how fast we’re seeing non-human traffic grow.”
AI is, of course, the reason for the growth in machine-made traffic. Seifert said that if traffic growth matches his predictions, “we’ve got to get a lot more efficient” – and of course volunteered Cloudflare’s service as a source of that efficiency. He also thinks more traffic from machines will mean more security threats.
Cloudflare won $696 million of revenue for the quarter, a 36 percent year-over-year jump – but almost a rounding error compared to the $160-billion-plus run rate at AWS and Google Cloud’s expected $100-billion-plus annual revenue. Losses more than tripled, to $205.7 million.
Execs and investors weren’t fussed because the revenue growth beat expectations and the company announced it has signed up record numbers of large companies.
Investors may also have been impressed by Cloudflare’s low planned capital expenditure, which Seifert said will come in at 14 or 15 percent of the company’s forecast $2.865 to $2.87 billion revenue – just $430 million or so. Again, that’s almost a rounding error compared to the trillions being spent on AI infrastructure by Cloudflare’s rivals.
CEO Matthew Prince used that low capex number to take a swipe at his competitors.
“If you’re selling what is just commodity compute, if you’re basically letting an AI company use your balance sheet and your credit rating in order to buy servers that are the same as everybody else’s servers, then that’s just not attractive business for us,” he said.
Prince said Cloudflare aims to “squeeze as much out of every Capex dollar as possible” and has the attitude to ask, “How can you get more out of the memory or storage that we have in every box that we have?”
The CEO said that hyperscalers have “super-low” GPU utilization rates. “It’s that what they’re selling is just a box, and it’s up to the customers in order to actually maximize the utilization.
“The hyperscalers, the traditional first-generation clouds, are in the business of buying a server and then trying to sell it back, lease it back, and get five turns of revenue off of it,” he said. “We’re in a very different business where we’re selling actually work getting done, and then instead of it being up to the customer to get as much out of the server as possible, we need to do the work to get as much out of the underlying equipment as possible and build the scheduling and the efficiency and everything else that’s out there.”
Prince said Cloudflare therefore doesn’t want to rent servers, “because over time, it’s a commodity business and it’s not very attractive.” The company will instead stick to its serverlesss offerings, which the CEO said are doing very nicely.
So too are investors who acquired the company’s shares, which rose 16 percent in after-hours trading to reach a new high that represents 68 percent growth in the year-to-date. ®
English (US) ·