AI Gateway Production Index — July 2026
- Source
- vercel.com
- Author
- Amelia Charles
- Date
Context
A model category's share of text processing can look very different from its share of spending. Vercel's July 2026 Production Index, reporting June traffic, says models handled 29% of AI Gateway while accounting for less than 4% of spending. Their token share had risen from 11% in April.
One reason is price: the report puts open-weight models at about a tenth of the gateway's average token price, so large volume costs comparatively little. These figures do not measure the models' accuracy or their share of the entire AI market. A usage ranking and a spending ranking answer different questions, even when both describe the same traffic.
- open weights — A model whose trained parameters are published for anyone to download and run — unlike API-only models you can access but never possess.
- token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.
“Open-weight models ran 29% of gateway tokens in June on just under 4% of spend. That is nearly a third of the tokens for one twenty-fifth of the dollars.”
“This is evidence of the routing discipline June's report documented, now visible in the aggregate: high-volume work goes to low-cost models, high-risk work stays on the frontier.”
“Roughly one in eight enterprise customers now runs an open-weight model in production.”
“And on current trajectories, an open-weight lab will soon be the second-largest by volume on AI Gateway.”
“The market spent more overall, but not more per token.”
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