AI Gateway
What is it?
AI Gateway is a proxy that sits between your application and AI providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Cohere, Workers AI, etc.). It gives you observability, control, and cost management for all your AI API calls in one place. Think of it as a smart layer that monitors, caches, rate limits, and logs every interaction your application has with AI models.
What problem does it solve?
As companies integrate AI into their products, they face operational challenges:
- Visibility: "How many AI calls are we making? What are they costing us? Which prompts are failing?" Without a gateway, teams have no centralized visibility.
- Cost control: AI API costs can spiral. A bug or spike in traffic can rack up thousands of dollars in minutes. AI Gateway provides rate limiting and spending controls.
- Reliability: AI providers have outages. AI Gateway can cache responses and fall back to alternative providers.
- Multi-provider management: Many applications use multiple AI providers. AI Gateway provides a single interface for all of them.
How does it work?
- Instead of calling an AI provider directly (e.g.,
api.openai.com), your application routes requests through Cloudflare's AI Gateway. - AI Gateway logs every request — model, prompt, response, latency, cost, and tokens used.
- Caching: Identical prompts return cached responses instead of making a new API call, saving cost and reducing latency.
- Rate limiting: Set limits on requests per minute/hour to prevent runaway costs.
- Fallback routing: If one provider fails, automatically route to another.
- Analytics dashboard: View real-time metrics on usage, costs, latency, and error rates.
AI Gateway supports all major AI providers and any OpenAI-compatible API with a simple URL change — no code modifications needed.
Why it matters strategically
AI Gateway is the bridge between Acts 3 and 4. It leverages Cloudflare's network position (sitting between applications and the internet) to insert value in the AI application stack. As AI usage grows exponentially, AI Gateway positions Cloudflare as essential infrastructure for AI applications. The strategic play: become the control plane for all AI traffic, similar to how Cloudflare became the control plane for web traffic.