Bright Data, the world’s largest proxy and web data infrastructure company, crossed $300 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025 and is now growing at over 50 percent year over year as it enters 2026.
This explosive growth is being driven by a customer segment that barely existed three years ago: AI companies.
Bright Data now serves more than 20,000 organisations, including 14 of the top 20 global large language model labs.
The reason these AI labs are buying proxy services is simple — they need massive amounts of web data to train and improve their models.
Why AI Companies Are Now the Largest Buyers of Web Data and Proxies
Training a modern large language model requires crawling enormous amounts of text data from the public internet. But websites have become much more aggressive about blocking automated crawlers.
They use CAPTCHAs, bot detection systems, rate limiting, and IP blocking to stop web scrapers.
Without a robust proxy infrastructure, AI companies would simply not be able to collect the fresh, diverse, and large-scale web data they need to keep their models up to date.
This is why Bright Data’s growth has accelerated so dramatically as the AI industry has grown.
The proxy market is changing as a result of this new customer base. AI companies have different needs from traditional web scraping customers.
They need to collect data at much larger scale, across more geographic locations, and with much higher reliability than a typical business doing price monitoring or competitor research.
They also care deeply about data provenance — meaning they need to be able to show that the data was collected ethically and legally.
This has pushed Bright Data and other premium providers to invest heavily in compliance infrastructure, including know-your-customer verification for all new accounts.
Also read about: Agentic Proxy Model: AI Becomes Brand Gatekeeper
What This Means for the Wider Proxy and Web Scraping Market
The shift to AI-driven demand is also changing proxy pricing. Premium providers like Bright Data, Oxylabs, and SOAX are maintaining or increasing their prices even as some cheaper providers lower theirs.
This is because the customers who matter most in 2026 — AI labs and enterprise data teams — are willing to pay for quality, reliability, and compliance.
They cannot afford the risk of an unreliable proxy network causing their training data pipeline to fail. For these customers, the cheapest option is rarely the right option.
For smaller businesses and individual developers who use proxies for standard scraping tasks, the practical impact of this AI-driven market shift is that the best providers are increasingly focused on enterprise customers.
Getting good technical support from a major provider as a small customer is becoming harder as their attention turns to larger accounts.
This is creating an opportunity for mid-tier providers to fill the gap for developers and small businesses who need reliable proxies at reasonable prices without the enterprise-level price tags of the market leaders.
More News To Read: