Cloudflare Says: Making Money from AI with Legacy Applications Is Nearly Impossible
New data analysis from Cloudflare reveals that returns on AI investments depend on often-overlooked fundamental infrastructure investments. The company states that legacy applications lacking modern, scalable infrastructure have almost no chance of achieving efficiency with AI.
Stunning AI Report from Cloudflare: The Key to Success Lies in 'Boring' Infrastructure
Internet infrastructure and security giant Cloudflare has published a striking analysis for companies seeking financial returns from artificial intelligence (AI) projects. According to the company's data, applications built on outdated technologies and obsolete architectures have almost no chance of making money from AI. The secret to success lies in fundamental infrastructure modernization, which many investors find 'boring'.
Cloudflare's analysis shows that investments in modern, cloud-native, and serverless architectures can increase the return on AI investments by up to three times. This contrasts with the reality that many companies in the sector neglect basic infrastructure while focusing on AI.
Legacy Systems Cannot Handle the AI Load
Traditional, monolithic applications and legacy data center systems struggle to adapt to the high processing power, low latency, and sudden traffic spikes required by AI models. Serverless solutions like Cloudflare's Workers platform aim to overcome this problem by allowing developers to run code on a global network without the need to manage their own servers. The platform can run JavaScript or WASM (WebAssembly) code at edge locations situated in over 300 cities worldwide.
Moving beyond being just a content delivery network (CDN) or firewall provider, Cloudflare offers a comprehensive developer ecosystem with Pages for website hosting, R2 for object storage, and D1 for distributed database. This integrated approach creates a critical foundation for the development and deployment of AI applications.
Security and Performance Are Essential for AI
AI projects require not only processing power but also high-level security and stability. Cloudflare emphasizes that its global network provides built-in DDoS protection, web application firewall (WAF), and bot management, which are crucial for safeguarding AI models and data. The company argues that attempting to retrofit these security layers onto outdated infrastructure is inefficient and costly.
The report concludes that the path to profitable AI is not through flashy algorithms alone, but through the unglamorous work of modernizing the underlying stack. Companies that invest in scalable, secure, and performant infrastructure will be the ones to unlock the true financial potential of artificial intelligence.
