Cloudflare Adds 18 Cities, Tops 270 Global Locations
Cloudflare has expanded its network with 18 new cities across Africa, South America, Asia, and the Middle East, bringing the total to more than 270 locations worldwide. The new deployments span 10 countries:
- Accra, Ghana
- Almaty, Kazakhstan
- Bhubaneshwar, India
- Chiang Mai, Thailand
- Joinville, Brazil
- Erbil, Iraq
- Fukuoka, Japan
- Goiânia, Brazil
- Haifa, Israel
- Harare, Zimbabwe
- Juazeiro do Norte, Brazil
- Kanpur, India
- Manaus, Brazil
- Naha, Japan
- Patna, India
- São José do Rio Preto, Brazil
- Tashkent, Uzbekistan
- Uberlândia, Brazil
How ISP Partnerships Improve Performance
The additions are part of Cloudflare's Edge Partnership Program, which places Cloudflare servers directly inside ISP networks. With Cloudflare acting as a reverse proxy for nearly 20% of Internet properties, the traffic volume from individual ISPs can be substantial. Rather than routing that traffic over long distances to reach Cloudflare's nearest data center, the program embeds infrastructure closer to subscribers.
This arrangement cuts backhaul traffic for the ISP while giving subscribers significantly faster access to Cloudflare-hosted sites. The geography matters: for example, requests from an Israeli ISP that previously had to cross into Europe could cover thousands of kilometers before reaching content.
Case Study: Israel
Before Cloudflare deployed with a large Israeli ISP in early 2022, subscriber requests to Cloudflare-backed sites were routed via the Internet backbone. The traffic destinations were heavily concentrated in Europe: 48% went to Frankfurt, 33% to London, and 18% to Amsterdam.
After turning up deployments in Tel Aviv and Haifa in January and March 2022, nearly all requests from the ISP's subscribers are now served locally within Israel. The typical request that once traveled roughly 3,000 km now travels 65 km or less. Median response time dropped from 86ms to 29ms — a 66% improvement — within weeks of the deployment going live.
Before the on-net presence, no requests could be served in under 50ms because the physical distance was too great. Now 66% of requests complete in under 50ms, and 85% finish in under 100ms, compared with 66% previously. Cloudflare says it will continue to report on performance gains as new locations come online.
