San Francisco-based Cloudflare said Friday that the entire team behind Deno, the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime started by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, is joining the company. The move ends Deno's run as an independent platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.

What happens to Deno

In a post on Deno's blog, Dahl said the team chose to put its future work into Cloudflare's platform instead of continuing a separate runtime and hosting service, and acknowledged that this is "a consequential change for people who have built on Deno." He laid out the timeline:

  • The Deno runtime will get monthly bug-fix and security releases for one more year. After that, the team will stop developing it, though the code stays open source and others are free to carry it on.
  • Deno Deploy, the company's hosting service, will keep running for six months and then shut down. Paying customers will get help moving to Cloudflare Workers.
  • JSR, the JavaScript package registry Deno launched, will keep operating, with its servers moving to Cloudflare.

Why Cloudflare wanted the team

The deal grew out of celld, an open-source program the Deno team released in August that lets developers run apps built for Cloudflare Workers and its Durable Objects storage system on their own machines, spread across many servers. Cloudflare engineer Kenton Varda wrote on the company blog that Cloudflare was "delighted" by it, because Cloudflare's own open-source runtime, workerd, can only run Durable Objects on a single machine, a gap the company had never found time to close.

Dahl and Deno co-founder Bert Belder will now lead an effort inside Cloudflare to make self-hosting workerd a fully supported option, folding celld's code and ideas into it. Varda pushed back on the common complaint that Workers is designed to lock customers in, noting that some customers have already left Cloudflare by running workerd themselves.

Dahl also pointed to AI agents as a reason for the move, saying Durable Objects combine cheap serverless computing, saved state and real-time connections in a way that suits software agents. The New Stack noted the deal follows Anthropic's purchase of the rival runtime Bun in December 2025. Unlike Deno, Bun is still being developed as its own open-source runtime.

For Bay Area developers who host projects on Deno Deploy, the six-month clock has started.