Cloudflare Inc

Cloudflare announced Friday that it is acquiring Deno, the startup behind the programming runtime of the same name. According to Cloudflare's Kenton Varda, principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers, the company will use the acquisition to improve its Workers programming model and platform, which lets customers build and run software on Cloudflare's network. Deno, co-founded by Bert Belder and Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, recently launched celld, an open source implementation of Workers that Varda said delighted the Cloudflare team. Varda pushed back on what he called a popular theory that Cloudflare made Workers work differently from other cloud platforms to create lock-in, saying the company believes being open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business. Dahl wrote that his team is joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and Deno had raised a total of $26 million, including a Series A led by Sequoia.

Consumer artificial intelligence agents could reshape online shopping, payments and financial services, but their success will depend on how established companies respond, according to Bernstein. The rapid growth of Muse, which can compare products and quotes, call businesses, send emails, fill forms, manage inboxes, cancel subscriptions and negotiate for users, has fuelled speculation about an "iPhone moment" for consumer AI, with OpenAI launching Dots and Google expected to improve Spark. Amazon blocked Muse within two weeks of launch, citing lack of prior notification, failure to identify itself, apparent collection of customer credentials and access to account pages and order histories, while others including Shopify, Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Wayfair, Dick's Sporting Goods, Ulta Beauty, Fanatics, Expedia and Instacart have partnered with Muse for shopping and checkout. Bernstein expects selective access rather than blanket blocking, and Muse is developing API connectors with retailers, although it currently mainly browses websites, fills forms and prepares orders for user confirmation. Cloudflare says AI-agent requests on its network rose over 1,700% in a year, while human traffic in heavily crawled retail and financial-services categories fell as much as 40%, and Bernstein sees payments as a potential winner, with more online transactions potentially benefiting Visa, Mastercard and processors Stripe, Adyen and Checkout.

Cloudflare shares jumped 6% in the afternoon session after the company announced that the Deno team joined its platform to simplify self-hosting Workers and Durable Objects, while Oppenheimer raised its price target on the stock to $430. Cloudflare said in a corporate blog post that the technical combination merges workerd and celld so developers can use identical primitives across multiple hosting environments. Oppenheimer analyst Param Singh officially increased the firm's valuation estimate for the cloud security and performance company. The move came alongside a broad tech sector recovery, with major equity averages moving higher on Friday as dip-buyers dismissed yesterday's OpenAI revenue concerns. Cloudflare is up 84.6% since the beginning of the year and, at $361.88 per share, has set a new 52-week high.

Cloudflare has become a public Certificate Authority, issuing post-quantum ready TLS certificates to external organizations. The company also introduced Basin, an open-source serverless data platform designed to handle application data without dedicated infrastructure management. In addition, Cloudflare entered a major partnership with Deutsche Telekom to offer joint security and connectivity services to enterprise clients across Europe. The moves extend Cloudflare beyond protecting and accelerating traffic into owning key trust primitives and a neutral, open data layer, in contrast to more closed ecosystems at players like Amazon or Microsoft. The Deutsche Telekom tie-up deepens enterprise penetration through large multi-product deals while testing a flagged risk around customer concentration and execution at scale.

The First Trust Cybersecurity ETF (CIBR) reached an all-time high on Monday as the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) notched a fresh record, with the fund's main holdings CrowdStrike (CRWD), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), and Fortinet (FTNT) all sitting near all-time highs after surging 132%, 131% and 97%, respectively. Rubrix (RBRK), F5 (FFIV), and Cloudflare (NET) also sit near record highs after a strong rally this year. Alarm bells from leadership at Anthropic and OpenAI prompted a rally in cybersecurity stocks last month, and the surge in AI agent usage and the popularity of Meta's (META) Muse have also highlighted the need for the industry. "Agents going rogue is the biggest risk today," Jay Chaudhury, CEO of Zscaler, told Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi on Monday, adding that a hijacked or rogue agent on a corporate network is far more dangerous because it works at machine speed. Morgan Stanley analysts, who have Overweight recommendations on Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Okta (OKTA), expect corporate spending on cybersecurity software to grow by 23% annually through 2028, potentially accelerating to 33% annually if major cyberattacks spur new government mandates.

Cloudflare has entered a strategic partnership with Deutsche Telekom under which the German carrier will add Cloudflare's security and connectivity solutions to its enterprise portfolio and the two companies will directly connect their networks. Deutsche Telekom will also train and certify its professionals on the Cloudflare platform through T-Systems, giving customers support for consulting, implementation and managed security services. The deal covers protection of applications, networks and data as well as AI workloads, and the companies plan to work on digital resilience and sovereignty in Europe, including protection of critical data and infrastructure and the use of post-quantum cryptography. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Cloudflare's 2026 and 2027 revenues indicates year-over-year growth of 32.5% and 28.6%, respectively. Cloudflare shares have jumped 77% in the year-to-date period compared with the Zacks Internet – Software industry's return of 9.9%, and the stock trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 35.28 versus the industry's average of 4.42.

MarketsandMarkets projects the global post-quantum cryptography market will grow from $0.42 billion in 2025 to $2.84 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 46.2%. The forecast is a third-party projection, not a guarantee, and timelines for quantum capability remain debated, though large infrastructure vendors have started publishing migration dates and quantum hardware companies are reporting rapid revenue growth off small bases. Among this week's developments, Vancouver-based Quantum Secure Encryption Corp. appointed Joseph Hall as Chief Intelligence Officer, adding more than 20 years of frontline cybersecurity and threat intelligence experience, with prior roles including Director of Threat Intel R&D at Infoblox and Principal Security Consultant at Fortinet; he will work with Chief Technology Officer Michael Massing, who previously led Dell SonicWall's Unified Threat Management business unit. QSE also announced grants of 350,000 stock options and 350,000 restricted share units to employees. Separately, Cloudflare announced plans to become a public certificate authority issuing post-quantum Merkle Tree Certificates with production issuance scheduled for the first quarter of 2027, IonQ reported second quarter 2026 revenue of $80.1 million, up 287% year over year, and raised its full-year 2026 revenue outlook to $450 million to $460 million, Akamai announced an $11.6 billion multi-year agreement with Anthropic to supply distributed AI infrastructure and cloud computing services over seven years, and Okta reported second quarter fiscal 2027 total revenue of $805 million, up 11%, guiding to fiscal 2027 revenue of $3.216 billion to $3.226 billion.

Cloudflare said growing enterprise interest in securing artificial intelligence agents is creating a new opportunity for its Zero Trust and SASE security business. On the second-quarter 2026 earnings call, management said the biggest reason large companies are reaching out is that they know they need to adopt AI but want to do so securely, and the company believes its agents-first security model can help it take share from traditional Zero Trust vendors that focus mainly on human users. In one example, a large U.K. government agency that was evaluating a first-generation Zero Trust provider canceled its existing request for proposal and is now reevaluating the project with an agents-first approach after discussing its AI agent plans with Cloudflare. Management said its SASE and Zero Trust platforms have gained share significantly over the past six months, helped by its developer platform and its focus on AI, while more than 50% of traffic on its network was nonhuman in the second quarter and more than 80% of major AI companies are already Cloudflare customers. Competitors are moving in the same direction: Zscaler ended fiscal 2026 with 950-plus Zero Trust Everywhere customers, up from more than 350 a year earlier, and Palo Alto Networks said Prisma AIRS crossed $100 million in ARR within four quarters of general availability with more than 800 customers by the end of fiscal 2026, while agentic traffic on its SASE platform rose ninefold over the past nine months and SASE bookings grew 40% in fiscal 2026. Cloudflare shares have jumped 77% year to date, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for its 2026 earnings stands at $1.26 per share, unchanged over the past 30 days and implying a 35.5% increase from the previous year.

Cloudflare shares jumped 6.8% in the afternoon session after the company announced the general availability of Python Workers on its global developer platform. The company said on its engineering blog that Python is now a fully supported, first-class language on its edge runtime, enabling developers to natively run web frameworks such as FastAPI and Django alongside AI libraries like LangChain without custom glue code. The update targets agentic artificial-intelligence workloads by embedding socket-level networking that connects external model APIs and serverless inference directly into Cloudflare's distributed network. The launch deepens Cloudflare's positioning in automated software workflows, following management's second-quarter earnings disclosure that non-human requests now account for more than 50% of network traffic. The stock also benefited as the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield fell roughly 3 basis points to 4.97%, slipping below the 5% threshold, and as attention turned to a U.S.–China summit later in the week slated to cover trade relations and artificial intelligence cooperation. Cloudflare is up 77.2% since the beginning of the year, and at $347.27 per share, it has set a new 52-week high.

Cloudflare said more than 50% of the traffic flowing across its network was nonhuman in the second quarter of 2026, reflecting rapid growth in AI agents and machine-to-machine traffic. The company ended the quarter with more than 7.4 million developers on its Workers platform, adding nearly two million in the quarter alone, and management said Workers remains one of the fastest-growing parts of its business. Cloudflare also introduced Monetization Gateway, Wallets and cloudflare.pay during the quarter to support transactions between AI agents, businesses and content providers. Second-quarter revenues increased 36% year over year, while dollar-based net retention reached 120%, and management said its total addressable market has expanded to more than $300 billion from $30 billion at the time of its IPO. The Zacks Consensus Estimate points to Cloudflare revenue growth of 32.5% in 2026 and 28.6% in 2027, with 2026 earnings estimated at $1.26 per share, up 35.5% from the prior year.

Cloudflare introduced new "Disallow AI Training" and AI crawler controls for website owners on 15 September 2026, letting site operators block AI training on their content while keeping pages indexable for traditional search engines. The company set criteria for "Accountable" crawlers and said it is participating in IETF efforts on open AI access standards. Cloudflare runs a global cloud network that helps businesses secure and deliver their websites and applications, and the company says the controls fit its role as an internet policy layer rather than just a content delivery utility. The launch does not yet answer how Cloudflare will charge for this layer of AI governance, or whether it becomes a paid tier versus table stakes in a market that also includes AWS and Akamai. Simply Wall St's analysis points to a $334 fair value for Cloudflare.

Cloudflare announced a new Accountable designation for AI crawling and launched Disallow AI Training, a setting that lets any website refuse AI training while staying fully in search results. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are now labeled as Accountable and have shown they meet Cloudflare's criteria or given specific timelines to meet them, while other mixed-use crawlers are blocked if site owners block training. Mixed-use crawlers, which collect content for both a search index and AI training, now make up 36.6% of verified crawler traffic on Cloudflare's network, the single largest category, and fewer than 1% of website owners block search crawlers while 17% restrict AI training. Cloudflare is replacing its Block AI Bots switch with three independent controls for search, AI training, and AI agents, and replacing Managed Robots.txt with Bot Preference Sync, which applies site owners' crawling preferences across all supported crawlers automatically. The company said every operator it designates as Accountable must give site owners a way to opt out of AI summaries, and by early next year its goal is to let site owners control how much of their content is included, in one place.

Cloudflare now sees agentic artificial intelligence as a growth opportunity that will dwarf its previous drivers, and has raised its long-term "North Star" growth target to 50% from 40%. Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert, speaking at an investor event, said the company's network architecture is positioned to support low-latency, secure and distributed AI inference workloads, and that Cloudflare expects to exit the year with momentum toward that objective. Demand is showing up through the Workers developer platform, where the company added 2 million developers quarter over quarter, and through variable consumption revenue, with companies including Lovable, Figma, Anthropic and OpenAI building on Workers; Cloudflare estimates that about 80% of significant AI enterprise infrastructure customers use its services. Seifert said Cloudflare is focused on inference rather than training the largest models, and that capital expenditures could rise but any increase would be expected to coincide with higher revenue. The company is also building monetization infrastructure for the agentic economy, including "pay per crawl," a Monetization Gateway, Cloudflare Wallets and identity tools, working with partners including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal and Coinbase, though Seifert acknowledged that significant technical work remains and that Cloudflare cannot yet process transactions at the millions-per-second scale it believes may be necessary.

CoreWeave shares fell 5% to $90.27 midday Thursday even after Michael Burry closed his highest-profile bearish bet against the AI infrastructure complex, a move that would normally lift a heavily shorted AI name. Through his firm Scion Asset Management, Burry closed his December put options on NVIDIA without rolling into later contracts, and he has said the exit should not be read as optimism. CoreWeave Chief Executive Michael Intrator said Wednesday that newer data-center deals carry more operating margin than earlier ones and that the deal-level economics are excellent; the company's Q2 2026 revenue rose 112.3% year over year to $2.58 billion, with revenue backlog around $104 billion. The bear case has shifted to the balance sheet, with a debt-to-equity ratio of 8.94 and interest expense of $640 million in Q2 against free cash flow of negative $5.74 billion after $6.42 billion in capex. Oracle is down 3% to $157.43 ahead of its fiscal Q1 2027 earnings release after the close, with options pricing an 11% move, while Cloudflare is nearly flat at $313.57 after raising its FY2026 revenue outlook to $2.864 billion to $2.87 billion.

Cloudflare Inc. raised its long-term growth outlook to 50 percent annually from 40 percent at present, sending its shares up 10.51 percent on Wednesday to close at $10.51 apiece. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026, Chief Finance Officer Thomas Seifert said the company is moving beyond a traditional software-as-a-service model to become an agentic AI platform, and that its future opportunity could be much larger than its business, with revenues projected to grow 36 percent year-on-year. In the second quarter, Cloudflare grew revenues 36 percent to $696.1 million from $512 million a year earlier, while its net loss widened 237 percent to $169.98 million from $50.4 million amid a 206 percent higher operating loss. Earlier this month the company partnered with OpenAI on the early launch of Vulnerability Discovery and Remediation, available in early access through Cloudflare Managed Defense, which CEO Matthew Prince said shifts defense strategy from chasing patches one vulnerability at a time to an automated approach. Institutional interest also rose in the second quarter, with 87 hedge funds holding positions in the stock, up from 84 in the prior quarter, and their combined holdings climbing 11.8 percent to $3.97 billion from $3.55 billion.

OpenAI has committed $1 billion to subsidize access to its Daybreak cyber models and products for organizations through a new initiative called "Daybreak for Frontline Defenders." The program, initially available only in the United States, will also provide hands-on training, technical assistance, and new partnerships over the next six months, with plans to expand to partner countries. Cybersecurity firms including Cloudflare, SentinelOne, Elastic, and Proofpoint have partnered with OpenAI to integrate Daybreak models into their operations. OpenAI will prioritize operators of essential services such as water and electric grid systems, state and local governments, community banks, nonprofits, and open-source maintainers. The company also announced a pilot with the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center to train cyber defenders. Daybreak, launched in May, offers AI capabilities for authorized cyber defense, including code review, threat analysis, and vulnerability prioritization.

Cloudflare, Inc. has announced Vulnerability Discovery and Remediation, a new service available in early access through Cloudflare Managed Defense, which uses OpenAI Daybreak models, including GPT-5.6 Cyber, to find, block, and fix software vulnerabilities automatically. The service integrates with Cloudflare's global network to provide real-time traffic context, enabling organizations to prioritize and remediate high-risk vulnerabilities before they are exploited. This launch comes as the National Vulnerability Database logged 60,475 vulnerabilities by September 2026, surpassing the 48,185 total for all of 2025. Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince emphasized the shift from manual patch chasing to automated edge defense, while OpenAI's McCall McIntyre highlighted the goal of giving defenders frontier AI safely. The service is available by invitation for select Cloudflare Enterprise customers.

Snowflake stock surged 23% to $377.11 after the company reported fiscal second-quarter revenue of $1.55 billion, beating estimates, and raised its fiscal 2027 product-revenue forecast to $6.07 billion. The earnings beat and guidance hike lifted other cloud stocks, with Oracle advancing 3% to $150.26 and Cloudflare gaining 2% to $276.90. Snowflake's product revenue grew 37% to $1.49 billion, marking its third consecutive quarter of accelerating growth, and its remaining performance obligations reached $9 billion. The company also raised its full-year non-GAAP operating-margin outlook to 14.5% from 13.5%. Despite the rally, Snowflake reported a GAAP net loss of $191.7 million and faces a higher valuation bar going forward.

Cloudflare has launched Adaptive Intelligence, a new AI-powered threat detection engine integrated into its Bot Management platform to stop automated attacks before they scale. The engine continuously analyzes live traffic and generates short-lived defensive rules as attackers change tactics, addressing the rising threat of AI-enabled bots. Cloudflare's second-quarter revenue rose 36% year over year to $696.1 million, with current remaining performance obligations up 35% and free cash flow at $56.4 million, or 8% of revenue. The launch strengthens Cloudflare's push into AI-driven security, potentially driving enterprise security spending as automated attacks become more sophisticated.

JFrog Ltd. has introduced the JFrog Traffic Controller, a new solution integrated with Zscaler, Cloudflare, and Netskope to enforce software supply chain security at the network edge, ensuring all package downloads flow through JFrog Artifactory as the single source of truth. The company's 2026 State of the Union report revealed a 451% surge in malicious packages year over year, reaching over 171,000 unique instances, yet only 40% of organizations have detection capabilities. The Traffic Controller reroutes outbound package requests through JFrog Curation, which inspects each package against security, license, and quality policies, blocking malicious ones and serving safe approved versions automatically. Available immediately, the solution supports Zscaler Internet Access, Cloudflare Gateway, and Netskope One SSE, with additional SASE partners expected to follow. JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Haim emphasized that the goal is to provide a universal control point without disrupting developer workflows, and the company will showcase the solution at swampUP 2026 in New York from September 1-3.

Cloudflare's Workers developer platform is becoming a key growth engine, with the company reporting over 7.4 million developers on the platform by the end of the second quarter of 2026, adding nearly two million in that quarter alone—more than the 1.5 million added during all of 2025. The platform is gaining traction among enterprise customers, with more including Workers in pool-of-funds contracts; for instance, an APAC technology company signed a $4 million Workers contract after an $8.7 million Application Services deal, and another signed a $6 million contract for AI agent capabilities. Cloudflare says Workers has moved beyond adoption to meaningfully contribute to revenues, driving consumption alongside security and networking products. The rise of AI agents could further boost the platform, with Zacks Consensus Estimates projecting 32.3% and 28.5% year-over-year revenue growth for 2026 and 2027, respectively. However, Cloudflare faces tough competition from Palo Alto Networks, whose SASE segment grew 40% year over year in fiscal Q3 2026, and Zscaler, which ended its fiscal Q3 with over 700 Zero Trust Everywhere enterprises, up from 550. Cloudflare's stock is up 40.7% year-to-date, trading at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 28.87 versus the industry's 3.91, and carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Baird tech strategist Ted Mortonson forecasts that hyperscaler capital expenditures will reach about $800 billion this year and could hit $1.1 trillion by 2027, driven by demand outstripping supply in compute and early-stage agentic adoption in enterprises. He notes that while semiconductor stocks have surged 61% and software indices are flat, the software sector is seeing short covering and institutional interest in system-of-record names. The security industry has been transformed by the introduction of Mythos, boosting names like Cloudflare, Crowdstrike, and Palo Alto, though these stocks now trade at nearly 30 times enterprise value to revenue, with some insider selling on the periphery. Mortonson cautions that changes in security architecture show up in pipeline rather than annual recurring revenue, and the street may not yet grasp how quickly that pipeline converts to orders.

The four content delivery stocks tracked by this publication reported a very strong second quarter, with group revenues beating analysts' consensus estimates by 3.6% and next quarter's revenue guidance coming in 1.8% above expectations. Akamai Technologies reported revenues of $1.1 billion, up 5.4% year on year, but delivered the weakest performance against analyst estimates, weakest guidance update, and slowest revenue growth among its peers, with its stock down 4.9% since reporting. Fastly reported revenues of $183.3 million, up 23.3% year on year, achieving the biggest analyst estimate beat and highest guidance raise of the group, though its stock fell 8.3% since reporting. F5 reported revenues of $865.1 million, up 10.9% year on year, while Cloudflare reported revenues of $696.1 million, up 35.9% year on year, scoring the fastest revenue growth in the group and seeing its stock rise 3% since reporting.

Cloudflare has partnered with Signal as an independent Key Transparency auditor for the encrypted messaging app. The agreement expands Cloudflare's role in securing major messaging platforms, following its earlier collaboration with WhatsApp. As an external auditor, Cloudflare will help verify Signal's key transparency system for hundreds of millions of messaging users. This development broadens Cloudflare's influence in digital trust, privacy, and encryption standards across consumer communications.

Atlassian and Cloudflare reported strong quarterly results that pushed back against Wall Street's 'SaaSpocalypse' fears over slowing enterprise software demand. Atlassian posted adjusted earnings per share of $1.87, beating the $1.50 consensus, and grew its Remaining Performance Obligations 44% year-over-year to $4.8 billion, while its CEO announced plans to personally buy up to $250 million in company stock. Cloudflare delivered second-quarter revenue of $696.1 million, up 36% year-over-year and above the $666 million estimate, and raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to between $2.864 billion and $2.870 billion. Hedge fund holdings in Atlassian fell from 57 funds in the fourth quarter to 44 in the first quarter, with short interest at 11.20% of the float, while Cloudflare saw institutional accumulation rise from 70 to 84 funds and short interest of just 3.09%.

Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Wallets on August 4, 2026, giving autonomous software agents the ability to hold and spend money for the first time. The system uses a two-tier hierarchy of Account Wallets controlled by humans and Virtual Wallets assigned to individual agents via API keys, with spending caps and approved merchant lists set by the account owner. It relies on cloudflare.pay handles built on Web Bot Auth to provide persistent agent identity, and is integrated with the x402 protocol, which has already settled 160.6 million transactions worth $41.2 million across 7 chains. The x402 Foundation, a 40-member consortium including Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Google, AWS, Circle, Coinbase, Adyen, American Express, Fiserv, Ripple, and Shopify, launched on July 14, 2026 to standardize the underlying infrastructure. The Cloudflare Monetization Gateway, which opened its waitlist on July 1, 2025, will allow sites to charge agents per request, turning API calls into revenue events.

Cloudflare has entered the agent commerce race with a two-tier wallet architecture designed to give developers programmable control over how AI agents spend money. The company's new AI Agents platform, announced August 4, introduces Account Wallets for funding and Virtual Wallets for individual agents, each equipped with configurable guardrails including periodic spending allowances, merchant allow-lists, and per-transaction size caps. The move positions Cloudflare alongside Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, and AWS as a premier member of the x402 Foundation, the open-protocol consortium building settlement infrastructure for machine-initiated transactions. Cloudflare is also introducing cloudflare.pay, a human-readable stablecoin identifier that uses the x402 protocol for settlement, combining a payment rail and identity layer at the network infrastructure level. The announcement comes as the x402 Foundation has processed over 200 million transactions, though more than 95 percent are protocol signaling rather than actual commercial exchange, with real daily volume near $28,000 according to Artemis Analytics.

Lawson has launched Japan's first proof-of-concept trial for stablecoin payments at point-of-sale registers, while Cloudflare has unveiled a stablecoin-compatible wallet. Lawson's trial is taking place at a store in Takanawa Gateway City, and paying with JPYC was as effortless as a standard QR code payment. Cloudflare's wallet also supports autonomous payments by AI agents, marking a turning point where the internet itself embeds financial infrastructure. The moves by both companies symbolize that stablecoins are entering a phase where they are quietly woven into existing infrastructure, rather than emerging as a new protagonist.

Cloudflare shares surged 7.7% after the company reported second-quarter results that beat expectations and raised its full-year outlook. Revenue rose 35.9% to $696.1 million, exceeding estimates by 4.7%, while billings grew 34.8% to $753.5 million. Adjusted earnings per share of $0.29 beat consensus by 7.5%, and adjusted operating income reached $96.11 million, a 6.1% beat. CEO Matthew Prince noted that non-human, machine-to-machine AI traffic surpassed 50% of network volume for the first time, driving adoption of its Workers developer platform. Management lifted its full-year revenue guidance to $2.87 billion at the midpoint and adjusted EPS guidance to $1.26, and initiated a third-quarter outlook above Street forecasts.

ARK Invest, led by Cathie Wood, purchased approximately $36.9 million worth of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. shares last week, making SpaceX its largest stock buy. The firm acquired 316,963 shares across several funds, with about $19.7 million bought on August 5 after SpaceX shares fell 13.6% following its first public earnings report, and another roughly $13.2 million added as the stock rebounded nearly 16% on Friday. ARK also increased exposure to other AI infrastructure names including CoreWeave, Nvidia, and Cloudflare, while trimming positions in Palantir, Shopify, and Roblox.

Cloudflare announced a new suite of AI and agentic products, including Cloudflare OS, Identity-Aware AI Gateway, and Cloudflare Wallets. Cloudflare OS is an open-source AI workspace for developers building and running AI agents, while the Identity-Aware AI Gateway provides user and agent analytics for enterprise AI governance. Cloudflare Wallets aim to support agentic payments and identity, extending the company's reach into AI-driven financial transactions. The launch strengthens Cloudflare's positioning in AI infrastructure by tying agents, security, and transaction rails into its existing zero-trust and globally distributed network. The stock is currently at $300.27 with a 53.2% return year to date.

US stocks closed higher on Friday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising 151.83 points to 54,036.93. The S&P 500 gained 47.68 points to 7,757.64, a record high, and the Nasdaq surged 342.26 points to 26,690.62. The main driver was the US nonfarm payrolls report, which showed a decline of 23,000 jobs in July, sharply missing economists' expectations for an increase of 80,000. This eased market concerns that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates at its September meeting. According to the CME FedWatch Tool, most traders now expect the Fed to keep its policy rate steady at 3.50% to 3.75%. Software stocks boosted the market on strong earnings, with Cloudflare jumping over 5%, Atlassian soaring 35%, and Airbnb climbing 17% after reporting better-than-expected results. In European markets, the STOXX 600 index closed at 660.25, up 0.31%, marking a record high for the fourth straight session, supported by tech stocks and positive corporate earnings.

US stock indices advanced after an unexpected decline in July nonfarm payrolls and softer wage growth eased concerns about imminent Federal Reserve rate hikes. The S&P 500 gained 0.61%, the Dow added 0.25%, and the Nasdaq 100 rose 1.00%, while the 10-year Treasury yield fell 4 basis points to 4.64%. Software stocks surged, led by Atlassian’s more than 34% jump on a strong revenue forecast, and cybersecurity stocks rallied, led by an 8% jump in Cloudflare after its better-than-expected quarterly earnings. Chipmakers also gained, with Microchip Technology up more than 12% on an upbeat sales outlook, and Airbnb climbed more than 15% after reporting revenue above estimates and raising its full-year growth forecast.