Why AI Agents Are Making Cloudflare Rich

$615 million. That's what Cloudflare pulled in during Q4, beating Wall Street's $591 million estimate by a comfortable margin. The stock jumped 10% on the news. But here's the twist: the real story isn't about cloud infrastructure anymore.

It's about AI agents becoming the internet's new power users.

The Agent Economy Takes Off

CEO Matthew Prince painted a picture that should make every tech investor pay attention: "If AI agents are the new users of the internet, Cloudflare is the platform they run on and the network they pass through."

This isn't just CEO speak. Last month's viral sensation Moltbot—an open-source AI assistant built on Anthropic's Claude model—proved the point. As Moltbot exploded across social media, Cloudflare's stock rode the wave. Why? Because the bot relied heavily on Cloudflare's edge infrastructure and security platform to function.

Cloudflare didn't just watch from the sidelines. They launched Moltworker, a dedicated platform specifically designed to run Moltbot securely. Smart move.

The Numbers Tell a Story

The financial metrics reveal just how much this "fundamental re-platforming" is paying off:

• Adjusted EPS: 28 cents (vs. 27 cents expected)
• Revenue growth: 34% year-over-year
• Q1 guidance: $620-621 million (vs. $614 million expected)
• Full-year outlook: $2.79-2.80 billion (vs. $2.74 billion expected)
• Active developers: 4.5 million (end of 2025)

For a company known for conservative guidance, these projections are surprisingly bullish. Prince seems confident this AI agent trend has legs.

The Infrastructure Play

RBC Capital Markets analysts nailed why this matters: "AI agents require low-latency, secure inferencing that often scales up and scales down and is close to the user or 'edge' of the network."

Translation: As AI agents proliferate, they need infrastructure that's fast, secure, and geographically distributed. That's exactly what Cloudflare offers through its global network spanning over 320 cities.

Think about it—when an AI agent needs to process a request, it can't wait for data to travel halfway around the world. It needs edge computing. It needs security. It needs the ability to scale instantly. Cloudflare provides all three.

The Competitive Landscape Shifts

This puts pressure on traditional cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. While they've focused on massive data centers and compute power, Cloudflare has been quietly building the nervous system of the internet.

The question is whether the big three can pivot fast enough. AWS has CloudFront, Microsoft has Azure CDN, Google has Cloud CDN—but none have Cloudflare's focus on the edge or its developer-friendly approach.