Humans Will Be a 'Rounding Error' on the Internet Within Five Years, Says Cloudflare CFO
Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert has a habit of getting his traffic predictions wrong, and he's the first to admit it. Earlier forecasts had machine-generated internet traffic overtaking human-generated traffic by 2027. Machines actually crossed that threshold in May 2026, ahead of schedule. Undeterred, Seifert made an even bolder call on the company's Q2 earnings call: within five years, non-human traffic could run at 1,000 times the volume of human traffic.
"Humans will be a rounding error on the internet," he said, adding that this isn't because humans are browsing less, but because AI-driven machine traffic is growing so fast that human activity barely registers by comparison.
The culprit is obvious. AI agents, scrapers, bots, and automated systems are consuming bandwidth at a scale that makes your Netflix habit look quaint. Seifert noted that sustaining this kind of growth will require significant efficiency gains across the infrastructure layer and, naturally, suggested Cloudflare would be happy to help with that. He also flagged the security implications: more machine traffic means a larger attack surface.
The financials backing all this posturing are solid. Cloudflare posted $696 million in Q2 revenue, up 36 percent year-on-year, with record numbers of large enterprise customers signing on. Yes, losses more than tripled to $205.7 million, but Wall Street shrugged. Revenue beat expectations, and the growth story held up.
The more interesting number is capex. Cloudflare is projecting spend of around $430 million against forecast annual revenue of roughly $2.87 billion. For context, AWS and Google Cloud are burning through capital at a scale several orders of magnitude larger. CEO Matthew Prince was not subtle about what he thinks of that approach.
"If you're selling commodity compute, if you're basically letting an AI company use your balance sheet and your credit rating to buy servers that are the same as everybody else's servers, that's just not an attractive business for us," he said.
Prince's argument is that hyperscalers are essentially in the server rental business, shifting the burden of utilisation onto customers. Cloudflare, by contrast, positions itself as selling outcomes rather than raw compute, which means sweating its own infrastructure harder and building smarter scheduling on top of it. He pointed to what he described as "super-low" GPU utilisation rates at the big cloud providers as evidence that their model is inherently wasteful.
Whether that framing holds up under scrutiny is debatable, but investors seem to like the story. Shares jumped 16 percent in after-hours trading, putting the stock up around 68 percent for the year so far.