For the first time, core internet service provider Cloudflare saw more nonhuman traffic flow across its network than human traffic in the second quarter.

“The number of requests on our network from AI agents continues to grow unabated,” co-Chairperson and Chief Executive Matthew Prince said on the company’s Q2 earnings call on Aug. 6. “It’s clear that the agentic future needs a new kind of cloud.

“With the web shifting from human-driven browsing to AI answer engines and agent-driven commerce, we are witnessing a fundamental rewrite of the internet for machine-to-machine traffic.”

The San Francisco-based company this week launched Cloudflare Wallets and cloudflare.pay, which work together to add trust to agentic commerce, according to an Aug. 4 release. Users can assign virtual wallets with stablecoin balances to AI agents. The wallets have guardrails with human-set parameters and give AI agents a stable identity that builds confidence with those transacting with them, the release said.

Nonhuman traffic expected to continue growing

The growth of agentic traffic has boomed far more quickly than Prince and his colleagues had predicted, he said. When asked in November 2025 when nonhuman traffic would surpass human traffic, Cloudflare crunched the numbers and said this would occur in the second half of 2027. But, when Cloudflare reran the numbers in March, the estimate was moved up to H1 2027.

“I was quite surprised when in May of this year, our team came to me and said, ‘You won’t believe it, but nonhuman traffic has now passed human traffic online,’” Prince said. “And 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 nonhuman traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic.

“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 nonhuman traffic grow.”

Cloudflare is preparing for this eventuality by working closely with tech companies in the AI sector, Prince said, noting that more than 80% of major AI companies are Cloudflare customers.

Cloudflare and OpenAI launched a research pilot in July to explore methods for making AI search engine answers more accurate and timely, according to a July 8 release.

More than 20% of the internet sits on Cloudflare’s network, according to the company.

Customer base grows

Cloudflare has more than 221,000 paying customers, according to the company. As of June 30, Cloudflare has 4,698 customers each paying the company more than $100,000 per year, a 27% year-over-year increase, Prince said.

“We added a record number of these large customers: 986 net additions YoY, the most we have ever added over 12 months in our history,” he said. “For some context, we added as many paying customers this quarter as we had in total when we went public in Q3 of 2019.”

BY THE NUMBERS: Cloudflare reported in Q2:

• Revenue of $696.1 million, up 35.9% YoY;
• Operating expenses, which includes research and development, of $705.2 million, up 56.4% YoY; and
• A net loss of $170 million, increased from $50.4 million in Q2 2025.

Shares of Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) were up 4.31% from market open to $296.68 as of 2:50 p.m. ET today. The company has a market capitalization of $114.2 billion.

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