Bright Data, the world’s largest proxy and web data infrastructure company, crossed $300 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025 and entered 2026 growing at over 50% year over year.
The primary driver of this explosive growth is a customer segment that barely existed three years ago: AI companies training large language models.
Bright Data now serves more than 20,000 organisations, including 14 of the top 20 global LLM labs.
The reason AI labs are purchasing proxy services in large volumes is straightforward — training modern language models requires crawling enormous amounts of text data from the public internet, and websites have become dramatically more aggressive about blocking automated scrapers using CAPTCHA, bot detection systems, rate limiting, and IP blocking.
Residential proxy networks allow AI training pipelines to collect web data at scale while appearing as legitimate consumer traffic.
Bright Data: Premium Providers Are Holding Prices While Cheaper Alternatives Compete on Cost
The surge in AI-driven proxy demand is reshaping pricing dynamics across the market. Premium providers including Bright Data, Oxylabs, and SOAX are maintaining or increasing their prices while some lower-tier providers lower theirs to attract smaller customers.
The reasoning is that the customers who matter most in 2026 — AI labs and enterprise data teams — are willing to pay significantly more for quality, reliability, compliance documentation, and genuine ethical IP sourcing.
These buyers cannot afford the operational risk of an unreliable proxy network disrupting a multi-million dollar data training pipeline.
For smaller businesses and individual developers using proxies for standard scraping tasks, this market shift means that the best-resourced providers are increasingly focused on enterprise accounts, making support quality and response times more variable at lower budget tiers.
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