Open models now outspend OpenAI on Vercel gateway, taking 78% of token volume
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-09-19
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch reports a likely record day for open-model token share on its AI Gateway: open models hit 78.4% of tokens vs 21.6% for closed ones. By spend, the #3 and #4 models were Moonshot AI and DeepSeek, and combined with Z.ai their inference spend surpassed OpenAI at #2 — though that's cross-provider inference spend, not revenue to the labs.
Investor Gavin Baker added that open models keep taking share — not just tokens, now more dollars spent on open models than OpenAI — shifting margin from the model layer to the infra and app layers.
Related event: Open-Weight Models Hit Record 78.4% of Tokens on Vercel AI Gateway(10 posts)→
More from Infra
- Malaysia poised to become a compute superpower with both US and Chinese chips by next year — basedjensen · 2026-11-04
- ByteDance details USDB storage system: 85.8% lower write latency for recommender sequences — _reachsumit · 2026-11-04
- Oracle cancels $7B chip leasing deal with Tencent, FT reports — SumitGup · 2026-11-04
- Inference engine shrunk to 1023 bytes, still runs SmolLM2-135M — cneuralnetwork · 2026-11-04
- Musk says space data centers are 'looking pretty appealing right now' — elonmusk · 2026-11-04
- Data centers are turning to old jet engines as the wait for power grows — IndependentCoast3974 · 2026-11-04