Cloudflare Network Expansion: 250+ Cities, Tripled Capacity, 800% Backbone Growth
Cloudflare has announced a trio of infrastructure milestones: the network now spans more than 250 on-network cities globally, external network capacity has more than tripled since the start of 2020, and long-haul internal backbone capacity is up over 800% in the same period.
Why Physical Presence Matters
The rationale for city-level expansion is simple: fiber optic light travels at a fixed speed, and end users' last-mile copper or mobile connections are slower still. No amount of software can overcome the fundamental physics of distance. The only answer is placing servers physically closer to users.
As evidence, Cloudflare added ten new cities in Brazil over the past three months and measured the latency improvement for connections to the network before and after the expansion.
The result is that 95% of the Internet-connected world is now within 50 ms of a Cloudflare presence, and 80% is within 20 ms—a human blink takes 300-400 ms by comparison.
Seventeen New Cities, Plus China Expansion
Outside mainland China, 17 cities were added across eight countries in roughly two months: Guayaquil, Ecuador; Dammam, Saudi Arabia; Algiers, Algeria; Surat Thani, Thailand; Hagåtña, Guam, United States; Krasnoyarsk, Russia; Cagayan, Philippines; and ten Brazilian cities—Caçador, Ribeirão Preto, Brasília, Florianópolis, Sorocaba, Itajaí, Belém, Americana, Blumenau, and Belo Horizonte.
In mainland China, work with partner JD Cloud and AI brings the total to 37 cities: Anqing and Huainan, Anhui; Beijing; Fuzhou and Quanzhou, Fujian; Lanzhou, Gansu; Foshan, Guangzhou, and Maoming, Guangdong; Guiyang, Guizhou; Chengmai and Haikou, Hainan; Langfang and Qinhuangdao, Hebei; Zhengzhou, Henan; Shiyan and Yichang, Hubei; Changde and Yiyang, Hunan; Hohhot, Inner Mongolia; Changzhou, Suqian, and Wuxi, Jiangsu; Nanchang and Xinyu, Jiangxi; Dalian and Shenyang, Liaoning; Xining, Qinghai; Baoji and Xianyang, Shaanxi; Jinan and Qingdao, Shandong; Shanghai; Chengdu, Sichuan; and Jinhua, Quzhou, and Taizhou, Zhejiang. Locations are subject to change—cities may be trialed for performance over weeks or months and adjusted as needed.
External Connectivity: A 3.5x Jump
External network capacity has grown 3.5x since the start of 2020. New city deployments alone mean nothing if the network is not interconnected with other networks. Even though last-mile ISPs sometimes still "trombone" traffic across distant paths, more interconnection generally translates to faster Internet for end users.
Growth has been distributed across both user-facing networks and those of hosting and cloud providers. Cloudflare is increasingly bypassing intermediaries by deploying more Private Network Interconnects (PNIs) and Cloudflare Network Interconnects (CNIs) directly to customers. These direct connections can reduce egress costs—especially with Bandwidth Alliance partners—while improving speed, reliability, and privacy, since traffic traverses fewer networks over less distance. Only 30% of the newly doubled capacity consists of transit; the remaining 70% flows over PNIs/CNIs physically or logical peering sessions at Internet exchange points.
Backbone Rebuild: Private Highways Between Cities
Hundreds of new segments have been quietly added to the backbone—dedicated fiber and reserved wavelength portions connecting Cloudflare data centers. Capacity splits roughly 55/45 between metro links, which redundantly interconnect data centers within a single presence, and long-haul links, which connect data centers across cities.
The backbone accelerates customer-facing products including Argo Smart Routing, Argo Tiered Caching, and WARP+. Compared to public Internet routing—"local roads"—the backbone functions as a private highway: it not only directly connects cities but is reliably faster and subject to fewer issues. More detailed benchmarks of the speedups will appear in a future post.
The backbone also offers security advantages. Cloudflare signs all its BGP routes with RPKI and pushes adjacent networks to do the same in order to avoid route hijacks, and it encrypts both external and internal traffic. But the most secure and private option remains keeping traffic on the network to the greatest extent possible.
Expansion has focused on undersea rings connecting North America to Europe and Asia to North America. These rely on geographically diverse subsea systems connecting to diverse routers and data centers on both ends: four transatlantic cables, three transamerican cables linking South and North America, and three transpacific cables. Traffic from Los Angeles can travel as far west as Singapore or as far east as Moscow entirely on Cloudflare's network.
The backbone growth stems from improved traffic forecast modeling, tight internal feedback loops on link utilization, and expanded teams and partnerships. Cloudflare now maintains a global view of capacity, pricing, and link desirability similar to what it had for transit and peering. The result: long-haul backbone capacity doubled this past year and increased more than 800% since early 2020.
Moving traffic onto the backbone rather than external transit and peering connections frees capacity for explicit needs like last-hop routes and failover, while insulating users from outages on other global networks, such as those experienced by CenturyLink and Verizon.
From Most Global to Most Local
A map highlighting all 250+ cities in which Cloudflare is deployed.
The combined growth in cities, capacity, and backbone represents a shift from being the most global network to being the most local one as well—with the goal of providing security, privacy, and reliability universally rather than only to those who can pay for fundamental Internet rights. The network investment has already paid significant dividends, according to the company.
