Cloudflare Just Gained 28% in a Month: Is It Too Late to Buy NET Stock Now?
Cloudflare's network just crossed a threshold that changes the math on who actually uses the internet, and investors are betting that milestone turns into something much bigger than a one-month stock surge.
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Cloud software’s past-month rally landed mostly on two names, and Cloudflare (NYSE:NET | NET Price Prediction) is the one tied most directly to machine-driven internet traffic. Cloudflare stock is up 28% over the past month and trades at $357.02. That run raises a fair question about how much of Cloudflare’s growth story the share price already reflects.
Checking in on the peers, Datadog (NASDAQ:DDOG) stock is up 31% over the past month and trades at $278.07, an even faster climb. Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) stock is up 0.98% over the past month and trades at $340.48, a nearly flat performance when compared to the other two cloud names.
At the same time, the First Trust Cloud Computing ETF (NASDAQ:SKYY) and the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) are each up 6% over the past month. Both funds gained far less than Cloudflare and Datadog shares, placing the bulk of the move in two stocks.
Non-Human Traffic Becomes the Majority
Cloudflare reported its second-quarter 2026 results on August 6, with the company’s revenue up 36% from a year earlier. The more striking detail came from Cloudflare’s network, where more than half of the traffic was non-human for the first time. That means machines, such as bots, crawlers and artificial intelligence (AI) agents, now generate most of the requests the company handles.
Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert tied Cloudflare’s quarter to that shift, stating, “We delivered a stellar second quarter with strength across all major metrics we track, driven in particular by another quarter of rapid growth in our Workers developer platform and agentic workloads across our network.” Agentic workloads are tasks that AI agents carry out on their own, and Cloudflare’s Workers platform gives developers a lightweight place to build and run that code.
Datadog Runs as Snowflake Stalls
Datadog sells observability software that monitors applications and infrastructure, while Snowflake offers a data platform charged on consumption. Revenue at Cloudflare, Datadog and Snowflake rises as workloads grow, even though each company operates at a different layer of the technology stack.
That shared billing model makes Snowflake’s flat month the more telling detail. Snowflake stock barely moved while Datadog and Cloudflare shares ran, a sign that the market is paying up for specific AI traffic and monitoring stories in this stretch.
Cloudflare co-founder Matthew Prince put the trend in sharper terms on the second-quarter call, declaring, “In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the Internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that’s just how fast we’re seeing non-human traffic grow.” Beyond security, Cloudflare is building payment rails and controls meant to let AI agents pay tiny fees per request, a potential new way to monetize machine traffic.
Weighing a Narrow Rally Built on an Early Story
The bull case for Cloudflare rests on non-human traffic becoming the majority of what crosses the network, since a company paid to route and secure traffic benefits from more of it (we covered seven of the companies supplying the AI data-center expansion, power, cooling and networking included, which you can grab here). However, this narrow rally is priced on a machine-traffic story still in its early innings, and Cloudflare stock has already collected a 28% gain in a month. Cloudflare also still reports GAAP net losses, tying its valuation closely to sustained growth.
The next Cloudflare quarterly report should show whether machine traffic translates into faster revenue growth. Datadog’s and Snowflake’s next results could also show whether the AI demand behind the two big movers spreads across cloud software more broadly.
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David Moadel is financial writer specializing in stocks, ETFs, options, precious metals, and Bitcoin. David has written well over 1,000 articles for leading online publications, helping investors understand markets, income strategies, and risk.His work has appeared in The Motley Fool, InvestorPlace, U.S. News & World Report, TipRanks, ValueWalk, Benzinga, Market Realist, TalkMarkets, Finmasters, 24/7 Wall St., and others.With a master’s degree in education, David has taught at the elementary, high school, and college levels. That teaching background shapes his writing style: clear, educational, and practical. David has also built a loyal social-media audience by providing trustworthy financial content on YouTube, X/Twitter, and StockTwits.
