Cloudflare is going to extend the lifespan of its current server farm. This will subsequently save on operational costs.
Cloudflare is going to extend the lifespan of its server farm. Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert announced this in a call on the 2023 annual results. Seifert indicated that through the constantly advanced capabilities of its server hardware and improvements in its data centres, the lifespan could be extended. This then saves the company on operating costs.
This involves a four- to five-year extension until 2028-2029 from the current fiscal year 2024. In total, extending the server life should save about $20 million.
However, the cloud networking and security giant does plan to invest more in network equipment in the coming year. Equipment spending will increase by between 10 and 12 percent throughout 2024.
Not the first tech giant
Cloudflare’s move to extend the life of the server farm in its data centres follows previous initiatives by other major hyperscalers. Previously, Amazon and Alphabet, among others, announced investments to extend the life of their servers and, thus, their basic infrastructure by several years.
Also read: Amazon to save billions by extending its server lifespan to six years
More investments in AI capabilities
Furthermore, Cloudflare announced that it will invest more in AI capabilities for its end users. Especially when it comes to the capacity for using and running AI workloads. Cloudflare has already rolled out additional inference GPUs in its data centres in 120 cities worldwide. This already exceeds the previously achievable goal of AI accelerators in 100 locations.
Annual figures 2023
In its 2023 annual figures, Cloudflare announced total revenue of $1.97 billion. Compared to 2022, this was a 33 percent increase.
For all of 2024, the cloud networking and security giant expects an increase in revenue of 27 percent over the previous year. Total revenue should then reach between $1.648 billion and $1.652 billion, according to the 2023 annual results.