What Happened?
Shares of cloud security and performance company Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) jumped 8% in the afternoon session after cloud software peer, Snowflake reported impressive first quarter earnings.
Snowflake's results validates what Cloudflare's CEO said on May 7: that AI agents are generating "hundreds of billions of agentic requests per month" on Cloudflare's network, and that number is growing exponentially. Cloudflare sits at the execution layer of the internet. When an AI agent built on Snowflake's data needs to take action, retrieve information, run code, or call an API, that request passes through Cloudflare's network.
The Anthropic partnership announced May 19 makes this concrete: Claude-powered agents execute code and access tools via Cloudflare Workers, and Snowflake uses Anthropic models in its own Cortex Intelligence product.
More AI applications built faster on Snowflake means more agent traffic on Cloudflare's infrastructure. SNOW's print makes NET's CEO Matthew Prince's framing, that AI is "the biggest tailwind we've ever seen", look prescient rather than defensive.
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What Is The Market Telling Us
Cloudflare’s shares are very volatile and have had 25 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 9 days ago when the stock gained 1.6% on the news that the company announced a partnership with Anthropic to launch Cloudflare Environments for Claude Managed Agents.
The integration would allow organizations to run agent loops on the Claude platform while using Cloudflare's global network and Workers developer platform to execute code, secure private connections, and provide agents with specialized tools. This means that when a Claude-powered agent needs to actually do something, like run a Python script, query a customer database, hit an internal API, that work happens inside Cloudflare's network.
Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince added "By partnering with Anthropic, we are giving developers the ability to execute code and access private data securely—backed by the speed and scale of our global network."
For investors, the bull case is "picks and shovels." Cloudflare doesn't need to build a better model than Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI; it just needs every agent transaction to route through its infrastructure. The platform offers virtual machines for complex tasks or sandboxes with millisecond boot times on Cloudflare Workers, meaning enterprises get isolation, audit logs, and Zero-Trust security by default, the three things compliance teams demand before letting an AI agent touch real systems.
Cloudflare is up 15.6% since the beginning of the year, but at $226.64 per share, it is still trading 11.7% below its 52-week high of $256.79 from May 2026. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Cloudflare’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $2,762.
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