Cloudflare declared its best quarterly results to date, crossing $3 billion in annual revenue during the third quarter of 2026.
The web giant banked $782 million in Q3 revenues, up 39% year-on-year (YoY). The quarter saw 158,000 new customers sign up to services, including a cabinet-level U.S. federal department, which signed a five-year, $10.3 million contract for Cloudflare's secure access service edge (SASE) portfolio.
Existing customers also renewed terms with the vendor, with a noted Fortune 100 cloud infrastructure provider signing a 13-month, $15.5 million contract for Cloudflare's cloud-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection services.
Its customer base of clients paying more than $100,000 per year grew 25% to 5,000 clients by the end of the latest quarter.
CEO Matthew Prince during the vendor's earnings call positioned Cloudflare as the mediator between scraping attempts by hyperscalers and AI labs to expand their AI services, and those developers, financial services organizations, e-commerce companies, and creators subjected to said scrapes.
Prince referred to a tie-up with OpenAI that saw it help the frontier maker add previously unknown webpages into its search index and help beef up ChatGPT output without repeating web crawls at scale and great token expense. As explored in SDxCentral's AI Infrastructure Supplement, vendors are increasingly building their own AI infrastructure to cut token costs as climbing prices begin to bite.
"Cloudflare could actually give them hints when a page had changed, when a menu price had updated, when anything had happened, and then they could get the freshest data, and they could actually crawl that," Prince claimed. "That helps OpenAI save money, and that actually helps the Cloudflare customers get the freshest data to them and make sure that it does not waste a ton of resources."
Speaking in the fallout of this week's Democrat electoral wins, Prince also pooh-poohed it being impacted should data center builds slow down in the mid-terms aftermath.
"I think as the market gets more rational ... what will happen is people will focus instead on where can we get more value (and efficiency)," Prince said. "It turns out that we are the platform that has built that. (It) allowed us to distribute our systems globally. ... What we are increasingly finding is in those places where we need more density, where agents are talking to agents and they might be in two data centers right next to each other, that density also benefits from that same isolated architecture."
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