Cloudflare CEO Predicts AI Agents Will Outnumber Humans 1,000-to-1

**John Coogan** (0:00)
How are you doing? Good to see you, I'm doing well.

**Jordi Hays** (0:03)
Great to see you.

**John Coogan** (0:04)
What's new in your world? You made some acquisitions, you made an acquisition, take us through it.

**Matthew Prince** (0:08)
Yeah, so we bought a company called VoidZero, which makes Veet, which is one of the most popular developer platforms that's there. It's just an incredible team. Evan Yu, who's the founder, is just a first-class human being, someone who our team is super excited to work with. The team that he's assembled is just great. I think that this is increasingly becoming the platform that is being used to power a lot of the agents that are running around the internet.
A lot of those agents are running on Cloudflare, so we think it's just a really natural combination.

**John Coogan** (0:43)
How simple is the synergy? Is it you'll funnel those 130 million users who download Veet every month, I think it's 130 million weekly downloads, weekly, wow, yeah, that's a lot, into preferring Cloudflare, defaulting to Cloudflare, or is there more synergy under the hood around developer integration, company integration? How are you thinking about this playing out?

**Matthew Prince** (1:10)
Yeah, we plan to continue to leave it as an open-source project, and support it, and invest in it. That way, we want to integrate it closely with Cloudflare's developer platform, and make sure that Cloudflare is the best place to run any sort of VEET project that you have. But it will work in any of the different platforms as well.
We just really wanted to make sure that Evan and his team have the support to make sure they could continue to really invest in what's just an incredible platform. We think that that is going to drive more developers to Cloudflare's workers platform as well.

**John Coogan** (1:47)
What are the headaches for developers these days? I know everyone's concerned about token costs and token budgets. Sometimes that doesn't show up for the developer. It's more like the CEO that's worried about it. But is uptime more difficult to maintain? We've been seeing screenshots of different uptime tracker status pages that have more and more red and yellow on them.
What's at the top of the stack and how are you helping?

**Matthew Prince** (2:12)
Yeah, I think that you need a different architecture than we've had to build the last generation of applications for what's coming with agents. If you imagine, there are about 100 million knowledge workers in the United States. If all of those knowledge workers had one agent, which was working on their behalf, and each of those agents was running in a container, a traditional container like something you get at AWS or a Google Cloud, the amount of just CPU resources that would be needed to run just those agents, assuming they've just had one agent per person, is about 50 percent of the total CPU capacity that's generated by all the different CPU manufacturers that are out there today. That's just the United States knowledge workers. If you take that to the world, then it's several times, 30 or 40 times the capacity of GPUs and CPUs that are existing today.
What we really think is that as these agents are creating code, you need a different platform for it.
Cloudflare workers was built not on containers as much, but on something called isolates, which is a much more efficient technology. What we're seeing is that as people are building these agents, as they're using them, it's just a much more natural place to be running them. I think why you're seeing more and more of the big AI labs have Cloudflare as the preferred target for where their code gets run. OpenAI released a project for their enterprise users a little while ago that again is targeting us. And we want to make sure that with things like VEET as first class citizens on Cloudflare, that we can help power that future. Because again, it's not going to be the same system that we built with the hyperscalers. It's going to be something different. And again, I think that we have a really good shot of building that different thing.

**John Coogan** (4:08)
So can you help me understand more about the problems of like CPU bottlenecks and then maybe some of the solutions? I'm just thinking about like, I would think bandwidth would be an issue, obviously CPU load, but is there a world where we get to some sort of convention around maybe it's the robots.txt or just the user agent and when Googlebot shows up or any other AI system, AI agent shows up, you're just delivering a, it's almost an MCP server, but you're just delivering something that looks more like a JSON package, something that's a little lighter, little less CPU intensive. Is there a path there to optimization? It feels like we're in the era of like squeeze every ounce of performance out of everything.