Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has made headlines for yet another bold statement about the future of AI. In his latest post on X, Musk backed the Cloudflare forecast that AI agents and other machine generated systems can eventually produce internet traffic at scale far beyond human activity. Musk stated that AI-driven internet traffic would “vastly exceed” human usage. The comments come as machine-generated traffic is already growing rapidly, with Cloudflare reporting that non-human traffic surpassed human-generated traffic earlier than it had previously expected.
Interestingly, Cloudflare’s data indicates that machine-generated traffic overtook human traffic in May 2026. The company had previously expected this shift to happen in 2027. Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert has suggested that the gap could widen dramatically if current trends continue. The company estimates that non-human traffic could eventually be as much as 1,000 times greater than human-generated traffic within five years.
The forecast does not mean people are spending less time online. Instead, the volume of automated activity is increasing as AI agents, bots and machine-to-machine services generate more requests and exchange more data across the internet.
Burry, who is known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis, responded to Musk arguing that the forecast may represent a lower hurdle than it initially appears. More importantly, he questioned who would finance all the activity generated by AI agents.
Previously, Burry has taken bearish positions in several companies exposed to AI infrastructure and has warned that heavy spending on data centres and computing hardware may eventually lead to excess capacity.
In the meantime, major technology companies continue to invest heavily in AI. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle are collectively expected to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on capital expenditure this year, with much of that investment directed towards AI infrastructure and data centres.