SpaceX-Cloudflare Partnership In The Making? Elon Musk Reviews NET CTO’s Proposal To Tackle Starlink’s AI Traffic Challenge

• NET stock dropped 2% in premarket trading on Monday, while SPCX stock gained 2.3%.
• Knecht said Cloudflare can help Starlink with bandwidth issues.
• The retail sentiment was ‘bullish’ for SPCX and ‘extremely bullish’ for NET as of Monday morning.

A Cloudflare-Starlink partnership may be in the making after Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht proposed that the two companies work together to tackle the networking challenges posed by rapidly growing AI traffic.

“Area needs innovation all the way down the stack,” Knecht said in a post on X, responding to a discussion about the bandwidth needed to support the expected surge in AI-generated Internet traffic. He added that Cloudflare and Starlink “should be building that together.”

NET stock dropped 2% in premarket trading on Monday, while SPCX stock gained 2.3%.

Cloudflare provides the Internet infrastructure that speeds up, secures and routes web traffic, enabling websites, apps and AI services to reliably connect users and machines at scale.

Knecht’s comments came after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said AI agentic Internet traffic will “vastly” exceed human usage, backing Cloudflare’s forecast that bot traffic could surpass human traffic by a factor of 1,000 within five years.

The discussion also highlighted the scale of bandwidth that could be required. Aaron Burnett, a technology executive, estimated global bandwidth at roughly 2-8 petabits per second, depending on how it is measured, and said 100,000 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites could provide about 100 petabits per second — potentially 10 to 50 times current global bandwidth.

Musk subsequently said Starlink was the “only system” capable of supporting the extremely rapid bandwidth growth required by AI.

Knecht, however, cautioned that bandwidth is only part of the challenge. “Most congestion control still assumes a stable path and a stable RTT,” he said, noting that low-Earth-orbit satellite networks do not have either.

Neither Cloudflare nor SpaceX has announced a partnership. Knecht’s comments nonetheless point to a potential collaboration between Cloudflare’s Internet infrastructure and Starlink’s satellite network as AI agents drive a sharp increase in machine-generated traffic.

On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment was ‘bullish’ for SPCX and ‘extremely bullish’ for NET.

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