Via bleepingcomputer.com
Open-weight models nearly tripled their share of Vercel's token volume in two months, reshaping how enterprises think about AI spending
Two months ago, open-weight AI models were a minority player on Vercel’s infrastructure. Now they’re running the show, at least by volume.
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch reported on August 22 that open-weight models accounted for 62% of all tokens processed through Vercel’s AI Gateway, up from 28.4% on June 24.
How fast is fast? #
Open-weight models held just 11% of Vercel’s token volume in April. By June they were at 29%. By late August they crossed 62%.
Vercel’s AI Gateway acts as a routing and traffic management layer for AI-powered applications, meaning its data reflects real production workloads from real companies, not benchmark experiments or lab conditions.
The structural thing happening here is cost. Open-weight models can run at roughly one-tenth the price of their closed-source counterparts, and enterprises have figured out that not every AI task needs a premium model to get the job done.
The spending paradox #
Despite commanding 62% of token volume, open-weight models are not commanding 62% of the money.
Anthropic’s closed models captured between 61% and 65% of total expenditure on the gateway in recent reporting periods. Claude is processing a minority of tokens but collecting a majority of the revenue.
DeepSeek has climbed to the top, or near the top, of Vercel’s token volume leaderboard, overtaking Google in processing share.
What this means for AI deployment broadly #
Major companies including AT&T and Coinbase have been noted among those emphasizing cost-reduction strategies in AI deployment, which aligns with exactly the kind of workload routing the Vercel data describes.
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