Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warns that Google’s three-decade head start in web crawling gives it an insurmountable data advantage in the AI race, as it sees 3.2 times more web pages than OpenAI and 4.8 times more than Microsoft, potentially making the AI war already decided.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince just revealed why Google may have already won the AI race. It has nothing to do with models or compute.
Prince: “At the end of the day, whoever has the most data wins in the era of AI.”
Every major AI lab is hitting the same wall. Not an… pic.twitter.com/EJPChLp8BP
— Dustin (@r0ck3t23) February 22, 2026
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince just revealed why Google may have already won the AI race. It has nothing to do with models or compute.
Prince: “At the end of the day, whoever has the most data wins in the era of AI.”
Every major AI lab is hitting the same wall. Not an intelligence ceiling. Not a hardware bottleneck.
A data limitation.
Prince: “What a lot of these companies are seeing is they’re hitting kind of a data limitation.”
Except one company isn’t hitting that wall.
Because one company spent thirty years building the most comprehensive index of human knowledge in existence.
Prince: “For every one page that OpenAI sees, Google is seeing 3.2.”
Read that again. For every single page GPTBot crawls, Google’s crawler has already seen three.
They see 4.8 times more of the web than Microsoft.
This isn’t a recent advantage. It’s a thirty-year head start that compounds with every passing day.
The AI race looks like a competition between frontier models and billion dollar compute clusters.
Underneath all of it, it’s a competition for data.
And Google is lapping the field so completely the gap isn’t closing.
It’s widening.
Prince: “Because Google has this unique access to the web that nobody else has, the game might just go to them.”
This is the Cloudflare CEO. The man who sees more internet traffic than almost anyone on earth.
When he says Google might run away with it, that’s not speculation. That’s a data point.
Prince: “Don’t let them leverage search to get a unique advantage in AI.”
The bottleneck for the next generation of AI isn’t intelligence. It isn’t compute. It isn’t engineering talent.
It’s access.
The moat isn’t better models. It’s decades of crawling data nobody else possesses and can’t replicate because the internet has already blocked everyone except Google from accessing it at scale.
Prince: “There’s a real concern that Google is going to run away with this and no one else will catch them.”
Level the playing field or the outcome is permanent.
The AI war might already be over.
We just haven’t announced the winner yet.