Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince: “There’s No Reason the Next TikTok or Cloudflare Couldn’t Come Out of Riyadh”

In an exclusive interview with Al Riyadh newspaper, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s progress in recent years has gone hand in hand with the growing importance of the internet. “Every Saudi should be just incredibly proud of the way the Kingdom has developed over the last 15 years, which is as long as Cloudflare has been around,” Prince told Al Riyadh.

He explained that Cloudflare has expanded its presence to meet rising demand in the Kingdom. “We have watched as internet use across the Kingdom has continued to grow along with business use cases, and as part of that, Cloudflare needs to be anywhere where the Internet is a critical part of infrastructure,” he said. “We are now up to eight different data centers that Cloudflare has in the Kingdom and we continue to offer all of the services across those eight different centers that Cloudflare can provide. And we’re proud of the fact that there are Saudi government ministries and large businesses, all of whom are using Cloudflare in order to be as safe, private, reliable and performant online as possible.”

Lessons from One of the World’s Largest DDoS Attacks

Prince recalled how Cloudflare stopped one of the largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks ever recorded this year. “DDoS attacks, for your readers that might not be aware, are when a cyber criminal sends so many requests to something that is on the internet that no one else can get through. It’s a little bit like a traffic jam in Riyadh,” he explained. “The scale of this attack is almost inconceivable. It would be as if every human being on Earth was hitting the refresh button on their browser two times a second, and that’s the amount of traffic that was actually being targeted,” he said. 

Prince added that attacks like these could be politically motivated, which he found concerning. “If somebody wants to silence someone just for their political beliefs, then unfortunately, there are now tools out there that create such an enormous amount of traffic that it can bring literally entire nations down.”

Cloudflare’s role, he said, is to protect against such threats. “We’re proud of the fact that we’ve built the tools to make sure that anyone who’s online can be protected from these types of attacks, and that we are the only network that is able to stand up to attacks that are this large. We continue to invest in our network, because unfortunately, we think these attacks are going to get even larger going forward.”

Building Guardrails for Artificial Intelligence

Prince also highlighted the rise of artificial intelligence. “Artificial intelligence is clearly a big deal. It’s going to transform many different industries. What’s hard is that we don’t entirely know how,” he said. “My guess is that 99 out of every $100 that’s being spent on artificial intelligence today is simply getting lit on fire, but the $1 might turn into the next revolutionary idea.”

At Cloudflare, he explained, the focus is on providing infrastructure for experimentation and ensuring safe use. “We’re making sure that people have the picks and shovels - the tools that they need in order to explore with artificial intelligence as efficiently and inexpensively as possible. And at the same time, we’re building the guardrails to make sure that as people use these tools, they do so in a safe and responsible way.”

Continued Expansion in the Region

On Cloudflare’s priorities in the Middle East, Prince said: “We want to go everywhere where we can service our customers and our customers’ customers, and we want to be as close as possible to wherever those population centers are, both to give the best possible performance and also to ensure that we’re able to continue to deliver our services in a way which is affordable - yes to the largest companies and public organisations in the world, but even down to individual developers and small businesses that oftentimes are under serviced in this space. And so I think we will continue to invest in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and in the greater Middle East region, as we’re just seeing more and more demand for our services.”

Advice for Saudi Startups

Prince praised the Kingdom''s investment in talent and education. “The Kingdom has made some very important and strategic investments in students, helping them understand the importance of areas like cybersecurity and AI,” he said.

Reflecting on Cloudflare’s own journey, he said: “When we first started Cloudflare, we thought that our first customers would be from the Bay Area near San Francisco, where we started. Whereas it turned out that our very first customers, actually, a lot of them, were coming from Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, places that really needed to have faster, better internet services.”

His message to Saudi entrepreneurs was clear: “It is as hard to build a small company as it is to build a big company. And so if you get to choose, picking that ability to build that next large multinational company, you can do that really, I think, with the tools that we have today, from anywhere in the world. And so just making sure that you’re setting your sights on something that could be important, not just here in the Kingdom, not just around this entire region, but really around the entire world. And there’s no reason that the next TikTok or the next Cloudflare couldn’t come out of Riyadh.”

Preparing for New Security Challenges

Prince also addressed concerns around post-quantum cryptography and AI-enabled deception. “If you have a brand new iPhone or Android phone today, and you’re connecting to a site which is on Cloudflare, or you’re using any of our services, you actually are protected, even if somebody announces a post-quantum computer tomorrow,” he said.

But with AI, he warned that traditional trust signals are weakening. “Just because someone calls you and sounds like your daughter, just because there’s someone who does a video call that looks like your banker doesn’t mean that those are real,” he said. “We’re going to have to trust our ears and our eyes less, and we’re going to have to actually rely on systems that are much more verifiable.”

NET Dollar: Supporting a New Business Model for the AI-Driven Internet

Prince concluded by discussing Cloudflare’s launch of NET Dollar, a stablecoin aimed at supporting online microtransactions. “A stablecoin is a digital currency that is supposed to stay incredibly stable over time, and its purpose is to facilitate much more reliable transactions using a system that is less costly than some of the traditional financial systems,” he explained.

He gave an example of how AI agents could drive demand for such payments. “If someone were reading your news publication and assigned their AI agent to go read all of the Arabic news and then summarize it back to them, you should get compensated for that,” he said. “It’s unlikely that people might pay a full subscription for each of those news feeds. But if you could have that agent pay a very small transaction thousands of times, that could be better for the user, and it could actually be better for you as a journalist.”

Prince said Cloudflare’s mission remains consistent. “We just want to make the Internet better. A better internet has to have some sort of payment infrastructure, and if there is someone else who provides that payment infrastructure, that’s fine. But we wanted to make sure that at least one company is focusing on building a payments infrastructure for agents online, because we do see that as being a big part of the future.”