Cloudflare said this week that the team behind Deno, the open-source JavaScript and TypeScript runtime, is joining the company, with Deno's creator Ryan Dahl set to help merge his project into Cloudflare's Workers platform. The companies did not disclose financial terms.
In a post on Cloudflare's blog, Dahl said the goal is to combine Deno's self-hostable runtime project, called celld, with Cloudflare's own open-source Workers runtime, workerd, to give developers a supported way to run Workers-style applications on infrastructure they control themselves rather than solely on Cloudflare's network.
The Deno team is joining Cloudflare, and we're merging workerd and celld!
— Ryan Dahl, creator of Deno and Node.js
Deno's standalone products will wind down on a staggered timeline. The core Deno runtime will continue to receive bug-fix and security updates for one more year before active development ends, though the project will remain open source. Deno Deploy, the company's hosting service that competed directly with Cloudflare Workers, will shut down within six months; Cloudflare says paying customers will get help migrating to Workers. The JSR package registry that Deno operates will keep running, now on Cloudflare's infrastructure.
A rival's code finds a new home
Technically, Cloudflare plans to fold code and design ideas from celld into workerd, aiming in particular to fix a long-standing limitation: workerd's support for Durable Objects, Cloudflare's model for stateful, partitioned applications, currently runs only as a single instance, which is useful for local testing but cannot scale in production. Cloudflare's Kenton Varda, addressing concerns about lock-in, pointed to Cloudflare's 2022 decision to open-source workerd partly at the request of large customers such as Shopify, who wanted an exit path before committing to Workers, and argued Workers was designed to be technically superior rather than to trap customers.
Deno had raised roughly $26 million in venture funding across two rounds before building out Deno Deploy, a bet that ultimately put it in head-to-head competition with the much larger infrastructure provider it is now joining. The deal leaves Cloudflare with direct control over two of the more prominent alternatives to Node.js in the JavaScript ecosystem, following Anthropic's acquisition of the Bun runtime in December 2025 — a pairing some developers have already begun describing informally as a consolidation of the field around a handful of large AI and cloud companies, though that framing reflects outside commentary rather than any stated strategy from the companies involved.
Cloudflare says further details on self-hosting support for Workers and Durable Objects will come in the following months, while developers can already experiment with celld and workerd today.
