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Cloudflare to acquire Replicate to build the most seamless AI Cloud for developers
C loudflare, a leading connectivity cloud company, has announced that it has agreed to acquire Replicate, an AI platform that makes it easy for developers to deploy and run AI models.
This acquisition will accelerate the company’ s vision to make Cloudflare Workers the leading end-to-end platform for building and running scalable, fast and reliable AI applications. Soon, developers building on Cloudflare will be able to access any AI model globally with just one line of code.
AI was initially the domain of academics and advanced researchers but has now shifted to a tool for the masses, one that developers of all levels want to use to innovate. But at present, running and scaling complex AI models requires specific GPU hardware and infrastructure.
Using the most popular advanced models currently demands a more sophisticated understanding of infrastructure, hardware and backend requirements, which can also be costly and time-consuming. By building a platform and marketplace that makes running or accessing any model as simple as one line of code, Replicate has streamlined how developers can fine-tune and experiment with the latest models in an accessible way.
“ The goal for our Workers developer platform has always been to abstract away the infrastructure complexities so that developers can focus on the thing they care about most – building and delivering amazing products,” said Matthew Prince, Cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare.
“ With Replicate, developers will be able to discover any model they want from one of the industry’ s largest catalogues, deploy it instantly on Cloudflare’ s global network and build an entire full-stack application in one place. Cloudflare will be the most seamless, all-in-one shop for AI development.”
Replicate created one of the industry’ s largest and most vibrant model catalogues and a thriving developer community. With this acquisition, Replicate’ s 50,000-plus production-ready models will be made available to Cloudflare Workers AI users to build serverless applications. Additionally, Replicate’ s deep expertise will power new capabilities on Workers AI, including running custom models and pipelines. Replicate’ s world-class team, with experience in building AI products and developer communities, will
Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare
also accelerate Cloudflare’ s AI inference and container roadmaps, immediately improving AI deployment capabilities.
“ We’ re still in the early innings of developers building AI applications and too much of the complexity falls on the developer today. Replicate was founded on the mission to solve that – to build the fundamental tools that make AI development truly accessible and easy,” said Ben Firshman, Co-founder and CEO of Replicate.
“ We are thrilled to be joining the Cloudflare team. By combining our extensive library of models and developer community with Cloudflare’ s global network, we are creating the platform where developers can seamlessly build and deploy tomorrow’ s next big AI applications.”
The acquisition is expected to close within the next two months and is subject to customary closing conditions. •
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