Dive Brief:
- Cloudflare will purchase AI developer platform Replicate for an undisclosed sum, the cloud and internet services provider said Monday. The acquisition, which gives Cloudflare access to more than 50,000 AI models, is expected to close within two months, the company said in the announcement.
- Replicate will continue to operate as a distinct brand, even as it is integrated into Cloudflare’s existing developer platform, according to a separate blog post. “The API isn’t changing. The models you’re using today will keep working,” Replicate said. “If you’ve built something on Replicate, it’ll keep running just like it does now.”
- The M&A move was announced the day before Cloudflare suffered an outage that took multiple websites offline, including ChatGPT and X. Customers first reported service interruptions Tuesday morning.
Dive Insight:
The Replicate acquisition expands a growing partner route to market for Cloudflare: software developers. The companies are aiming to become the default hub for AI application builders.
“We’re still in the early innings of developers building AI applications, and too much of the complexity falls on the developer today,” Replicate CEO Ben Firshman said.
Replicate’s unified API gives developers access to GPT-5, Claude Sonnet and other LLMs, providing a one-stop shop for app building, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in the announcement. “Developers will be able to discover any model they want from one of the industry’s largest catalogs, deploy it instantly on Cloudflare’s global network, and build an entire full-stack application in one place,” said Prince.
In addition to adding Replicate’s substantial model catalog, Cloudflare is gaining a community of developers. Replicate executives said they chose Cloudflare in part because of its developer-friendliness.
Cloudflare's network will function as the operating system for the tools and "abstractions" developers use. Models will be accessed through Cloudflare’s Workers AI inferencing platform, which has been a key driver of growth for the company.
“Our Workers developer platform continues to deliver outsized growth with the world's most innovative companies increasingly adopting Workers for running AI inference tasks as well as building AI agents and full stack applications,” Prince said during an October earnings call.
The company's content delivery network competitor Akamai announced earlier this month that its Inference Cloud is enjoying a demand surge. The acquisition fits with Cloudflare’s broader goal of being a platform for third-party partners. The company is leaning heavily on managed service providers and managed security service providers to bring its cloud offerings to business customers.
“We want our partners to deliver the services. That’s our goal for the rest of this year and into the next few years. How do we enable our partner community to deliver more services across all of our solutions?” Cloudflare Chief Partner Officer Tom Evans told Channel Dive.
Cloudflare initially attributed its Tuesday outage to an unusual uptick in traffic. The outage was not caused by an attack, the company’s CTO Dane Knecht later said in an X post.
Knecht apologized to customers, saying it took too long for Cloudflare to resolve the issue.
“Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today,” Knecht said. “The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back.
