Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) is one of the Best Stocks to Buy and Hold for 2026. On December 17, Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) and JD Cloud, a branch of JD.com, announced their strategic partnership to create an international platform that helps developers to manage, deploy, and scale AI workloads.
This collaboration comes as an expansion of the company’s 5-year partnership with JD. The aim of this extended partnership is to make the process of running trained AI models to generate outputs like chat responses or image analysis seamless. The companies will work on creating a high-performance AI-Cloud that reduces AI inference workloads by up to 80%. Moreover, the cloud will have enhanced security features, including Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, and global CDN to keep things reliable and safe.
That said, Wall Street has a positive opinion on the stock. Recently, on December 17, Stifel reiterated a Buy rating on Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) without disclosing any price targets. A day earlier, on December 16, Gregg Moskowitz from Mizuho Securities also reiterated a Buy rating on the stock with a price target of $280.
Stifel noted that Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) has positioned itself as an important player in the growing need for AI securities. The firm sees the need for AI security, identity security, Zero Trust Security, and more to become increasingly important in 2026 as the deployment of AI and agentic AI speeds up. Under these evolving market dynamics, Stifel sees Cloudflare as one of the companies positioned to benefit from AI deployments.
Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) is a cloud services provider that powers AI workloads through its Workers AI platform.
While we acknowledge the potential of NET as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you’re looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.
READ NEXT: 30 Stocks That Should Double in 3 Years and 11 Hidden AI Stocks to Buy Right Now.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
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