Backblaze Q2 2026 Network Stats Reveal AI Traffic Variability

Across Backblaze’s community, neocloud and hyperscaler visitors exhibits excessive volatility whereas CDN and internet hosting visitors maintains predictable patterns

Backblaze, Inc. (Nasdaq: BLZE), the storage platform powering AI infrastructure, as we speak printed its Q2 2026 Network Stats report. The third installment in its quarterly collection, this report highlights a brand new variance-based view that measures not simply how a lot knowledge strikes throughout Backblaze’s community, however how predictably it strikes.

Using a brand new time-series dataset constructed from 10-minute visitors samples, Backblaze modeled ingress and egress conduct towards statistical baselines to separate secure, predictable visitors from the extremely risky workloads that more and more outline AI infrastructure. The evaluation exhibits that neocloud and hyperscaler visitors behave nothing like the standard CDN, internet hosting, and ISP visitors that has moved throughout the web for many years.

“As we assist more and more extra AI workloads, we’ve wanted to not solely retailer but in addition transfer knowledge at scale,” stated Gleb Budman, CEO, Backblaze. “The previous a number of quarters, we’ve seen that neocloud workflows are basically completely different in comparison with conventional web visitors and we’re digging in deeper on that variance to optimize how we serve our prospects.”

Key findings from the Q2 2026 Network Stats report embody:

• AI visitors is basically extra risky than conventional web visitors—however not all in the identical means. Hyperscaler visitors confirmed the sharpest volatility, with egress swinging between 50 and 150 Gbps towards a secure, tightly managed ingress baseline. This sample is in keeping with bursty, on-demand buyer knowledge retrieval. Neocloud visitors confirmed a extra average, synchronized volatility, with ingress and egress scaling collectively in sustained, business-hour patterns. Even historically “regular” visitors sorts weren’t uniformly predictable: CDN ingress stayed practically flat, however CDN egress swung throughout a variety, peaking close to 600 Gbps. This underscores the necessity for infrastructure tailor-made to particular AI workloads.
• CDN visitors holds onto a brand new, greater baseline. CDN visitors is up 66% year-over-year, a sustained enhance slightly than a brief spike. This exhibits extra CDN suppliers are utilizing Backblaze as an origin retailer.
• AI workloads proceed to unfold geographically. Neocloud visitors magnitude (the quantity of information moved per distinctive IP handle) ticked up within the EU-Central area this quarter, alongside rising internet hosting visitors focus in EU-Central. This might mirror a broader trade development towards geographic dispersion of AI workloads, Backblaze’s personal rising footprint within the house, or some mixture of each.

“What defines AI visitors isn’t quantity. It’s timing. Traditional web visitors stays clean as a result of it’s hundreds of thousands of requests occurring at completely different instances. A GPU cluster is the other: tens of hundreds of machines transferring knowledge on the similar immediate, so the peaks by no means common out,” stated Dan Spraggins, CTO, Backblaze. “That’s why we run these workloads over personal community interconnects. We can engineer each by itself phrases, and one buyer’s burst by no means lands on one other’s visitors.”

Availability

The full report, together with detailed variance charts, traffic-type breakdowns, and geographic heatmaps, is out there on the Backblaze weblog: Network Stats for Q2 2026: All Eyes on Neocloud Traffic Variance.

Backblaze may also host a stay webinar on Tuesday, July 28, 2026, at 11:30 a.m. PT / 2:30 p.m. ET, that includes Brent Nowak, Manager, Network Engineering, and Stephanie Doyle, Sr. Manager, Market Intelligence, to stroll by the findings. Register right here.

The full Network Stats collection will be discovered at: www.backblaze.com/weblog/tag/networkstats

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