‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec

Thomas Seifert, Cloudflare's chief financial officer, has predicted that non-human traffic on the internet will surpass human-generated traffic by a factor of 1,000 within the next five years. This prediction comes after Cloudflare's initial estimate of 2027 turned out to be incorrect, as machine-generated traffic overtook human traffic in May 2026.

The rapid growth of AI-driven traffic is the primary reason for this shift, according to Seifert. He emphasized the need for increased efficiency to cope with this surge, suggesting that Cloudflare's service can help achieve this. Despite a significant revenue increase of 36% to $696 million in the latest quarter, losses more than tripled to $205.7 million, showing that the company's growth is still not enough to match industry giants like AWS and Google Cloud.

Cloudflare's low capital expenditure, accounting for only 14-15% of its $2.865 to $2.87 billion revenue forecast, has impressed investors and has been a key differentiator in its business model. CEO Matthew Prince highlighted this advantage over traditional cloud providers, who invest heavily in server infrastructure that often goes underutilized.

Prince argued that Cloudflare's focus on selling work rather than renting servers allows them to maximize the efficiency of their hardware and provide more value to their customers.