What Happened?
Shares of cloud security and performance company Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) jumped 11.1% in the afternoon session after it extended its recovery, continuing a rebound from the selloff on May 7 (when it reported earnings) that was, in hindsight, a partial market misread.
The Q1 2026 results were strong: revenue of $639.8 million, up 34% year-over-year, against a $628 million consensus, with adjusted EPS of $0.25 beating the $0.23 estimate. NET recovered approximately 8% the previous week during the SNOW-driven software rally and added further ground during the session.
The day's catalyst was Nvidia's Computex keynote confirming that the agentic AI era is arriving in fall 2026 with RTX Spark PC devices and Vera Rubin data center chips already in full production, precisely the infrastructure layer Cloudflare's restructuring was built to sit on top of.
The previous partnership with Anthropic to launch "Cloudflare Environments for Claude Managed Agents," providing secure sandboxes for autonomous agents on Cloudflare's network, gives the thesis a concrete near-term anchor. CEO Matthew Prince called AI "the biggest tailwind we've ever seen in Cloudflare's history.".
The shares closed the day at $270.66, up 11.9% from the previous close.
Is now the time to buy Cloudflare? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
What Is The Market Telling Us
Cloudflare’s shares are very volatile and have had 27 moves greater than 5% over the last year. But moves this big are rare even for Cloudflare and indicate this news significantly impacted the market’s perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 4 days ago when the stock gained 8% on the news that 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.
Cloudflare is up 37.1% since the beginning of the year, and at $268.81 per share, it has set a new 52-week high. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Cloudflare’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $3,236.
ONE MORE THING: 3 Hidden Platforms Growing 3X Faster than Amazon, Google, and PayPal. Amazon, Google, and Meta all followed the same playbook: Dominate an ignored market. Build an unbeatable moat. Scale until you’re unstoppable.
These three platforms are running that exact playbook right now. The early investors in Amazon made fortunes. The early investors in these could do the same. Get All 3 Stocks Here for FREE.
