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cloudflareThe company’s stock rose 5% on Wednesday after the company beat Wall Street’s fourth-quarter estimates and announced a positive outlook as the introduction of artificial intelligence boosts demand for networking and security tools.
CEO Matthew Prince said on an earnings call with analysts on Tuesday that the rise of AI and agent tools that can perform tasks on behalf of users is driving demand for Cloudflare’s networking and security products.
Prince said the company is getting a boost from the “fundamental replatforming” of the internet.
“If AI agents are new users of the internet, Cloudflare is the platform they run on and the network they traverse,” he said. “This creates a great flywheel.”
The global networking and cloud provider reported adjusted earnings of 28 cents per share on revenue of $615 million. That beat the 27 cents per share and $591 million in revenue expected by analysts surveyed by LSEG. Revenue increased 34% compared to a year ago.
Cloudflare also provided strong guidance for first-quarter revenue in the range of $620 million to $621 million, above analyst expectations of $614 million. Cloudflare expects full-year revenue to be between $2.79 billion and $2.8 billion, compared to expectations of $2.74 billion.
Last month, Cloudflare’s stock rose as Moltbot, an open-source AI personal assistant built on Anthropic’s Claude model, went viral and the company’s edge infrastructure and security platform proved effective at running agents.
The cybersecurity company then released its own Moltworker platform specifically for running Moltbot securely.
“The continued proliferation of AI agents will benefit Cloudflare and its Workers platform, as AI agents frequently scale up and down and require low-latency, secure inference close to the ‘edge’ of the user or network,” RBC Capital Markets analysts wrote last month.
Prince, who is also the company’s co-founder, said Cloudflare will end 2025 with 4.5 million active developers.
