Cloudflare Bets on Infrastructure Power as Big Tech Races Ahead with AI
As AI moves into this era of inference this year, it is already reshaping how information is accessed, consumed, and monetised, a quiet but consequential shift is underway in the Internet’s power structure. The companies shaping the future are no longer just search engines, social platforms, or AI model builders. Increasingly, they are the infrastructure providers that sit underneath everything — and decide what is permitted, protected, or priced.
Cloudflare’s fifth annual Impact Report makes that argument quite clearly. It presents the company not merely as a cybersecurity or connectivity provider, but as an actor attempting to re-engineer the Internet’s economic and civic foundations at a moment when AI is hollowing them out.
“Our mission—to help build a better Internet—is the driving force behind everything we do,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “In 2025, we took critical steps to further that mission by making our products free and accessible to those who need them most, from journalists facing attacks to startups and developers around the world working on the next generation of AI-native applications. A principled, accessible, and sustainable Internet is not just a goal; it’s our responsibility.”
When AI Breaks the Web’s Business Model
The report is unambiguous about what has changed. AI systems no longer function like traditional search engines. They ingest content at scale, synthesise answers directly, and often return nothing - no clicks, no traffic, no revenue - to the original creators.
Cloudflare’s data shows that AI crawlers are scraping content aggressively while driving dramatically less traffic back to websites. The result is a growing imbalance: publishers, journalists, and independent creators bear the cost of producing content, while AI systems extract its value upstream.
This is where Cloudflare draws a sharp distinction between itself and Big Tech peers.
While AI companies race to build larger models and platforms optimised for closed ecosystems, Cloudflare is positioning itself as the neutral infrastructure layer that restores consent and compensation. Through tools such as AI Crawl Control and emerging “pay per crawl” mechanisms, website owners can now see how AI systems use their content, block unwanted access, or charge for it.
The implication is structural. Rather than monetising attention through advertising — a model dominated by Google and Meta — Cloudflare is advocating for an Internet where value accrues to knowledge creation itself.
“Web traffic and clicks have never been a good measure of value,” the report argues. “AI has the opportunity to reshape the economics of the Internet to reward actual knowledge creation and other high-quality, unique, and local content.”
Security as a Public Good, Not a Premium Feature
The second pillar of Cloudflare’s positioning is its treatment of security not as a luxury product, but as civic infrastructure.
In 2025, the company protected more than 3,000 vulnerable Internet properties across 120 countries through Project Galileo, shielding journalists, human rights defenders, and humanitarian organisations from an average of 9.9 billion cyberattacks per month. Independent media alone faced roughly 290 million attacks per day.
Unlike Big Tech platforms, whose primary response to misinformation and digital harm is content moderation at scale, Cloudflare operates one layer lower — preventing attacks that silence voices before speech even happens.
The same philosophy underpins the Athenian Project, which provides free, enterprise-grade election security to governments. In the last US election cycle alone, Cloudflare blocked 200 million DDoS attacks targeting election infrastructure across 33 states and seven countries. The company also helped secure Moldova’s parliamentary elections amid sustained foreign interference and cyberattacks.
By framing elections and journalism as infrastructure rather than content, Cloudflare differentiates itself from platform companies whose incentives are tied to engagement, growth, and data extraction.
Infrastructure Versus Platforms
This is where the competitive contrast becomes clearest. Big Tech peers largely compete at the application and platform layers — search, social, commerce, AI interfaces. Their business models depend on scale, lock-in, and proprietary control.
Cloudflare, by contrast, is positioning itself as an open, interoperable layer that enforces rules rather than owning audiences. It participates heavily in standards bodies, pushes post-quantum encryption by default, and operates one of the world’s largest privacy-first DNS resolvers without monetising user data.
In a market where AI companies are under scrutiny for scraping, surveillance, and concentration of power, Cloudflare is effectively betting that neutrality, transparency, and restraint will become strategic advantages.
What This Means for Clients Across EMEA and India
For Cloudflare’s customers across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India, the shift outlined in the Impact Report has immediate and practical implications.
In Europe, where regulatory pressure around data sovereignty, AI transparency, and platform accountability is intensifying, Cloudflare’s model aligns closely with how the region’s digital economy is evolving. Enterprises, publishers, and public institutions face growing scrutiny over how data is accessed, where it is processed, and how automated systems interact with original content.
By enabling visibility, consent, and control at the network layer - rather than retroactive compliance at the application layer - Cloudflare gives regional organisations a way to operate within emerging AI and digital services regulations without surrendering scale or performance.
For media groups, publishers, and independent creators across EMEA, Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control and content protection tools address a challenge that has been particularly acute outside the US. Many regional news organisations lack the scale or leverage to negotiate directly with global AI platforms. By embedding negotiation and enforcement into infrastructure itself, Cloudflare lowers the barrier for these organisations to protect and monetise their content in an AI-driven web.
In the Middle East and Africa, where governments and enterprises are accelerating digital transformation while facing heightened geopolitical and cybersecurity risks, Cloudflare’s approach reframes security as resilience rather than insurance. Election authorities, financial institutions, energy companies, and national platforms benefit from security models designed for sustained, large-scale attack environments — without dependence on closed, country-specific systems.
The same architecture that protects democratic institutions globally is increasingly relevant to critical digital infrastructure across the region.
India, meanwhile, sits at the intersection of all these shifts. As one of the world’s fastest-growing digital economies and a major hub for AI development, India faces both opportunity and exposure. Cloudflare’s emphasis on edge-based AI access, open model choice, and local optimisation allows Indian startups and enterprises to deploy AI applications closer to users, reduce latency, and manage costs — without being locked into a single hyperscaler or model provider.
At the same time, India’s expanding digital public infrastructure, independent media ecosystem, and startup economy are particularly vulnerable to content extraction by global AI systems. Cloudflare’s infrastructure-level controls offer a way for Indian organisations to participate in the global AI economy on more balanced terms, retaining agency over data, content, and security.
Across EMEA and India, the report positions Cloudflare not just as a vendor, but as an enabling layer — one that allows regional organisations to scale globally while operating on their own regulatory, economic, and cultural terms.
A Different Kind of Power
In total, Cloudflare donated more than $19 million in products and services in 2025 through its impact programmes. It also announced plans to hire 1,111 interns in 2026, with a focus on expanding AI application skills across disciplines.
None of these portrays Cloudflare as an AI company in the conventional sense. Instead, the company is carving out a role as the rule-setter beneath AI — deciding how access works, how abuse is blocked, how creators are protected, and how the Internet remains open when economic incentives push toward closure.
In an era when Big Tech power is increasingly defined by who owns the interface, Cloudflare is making a different wager - that the future of the Internet will be shaped by who controls the infrastructure.