Inference Provider in plain English.

An inference provider is a company that runs AI models on its own servers and infrastructure, so developers can send requests to an API and get results back, without buying GPUs or managing model-serving infrastructure themselves. This includes both the labs that host their own frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) and specialized providers that host open-weight models on behalf of others — Together AI, Fireworks AI, Groq, and Replicate, plus cloud platforms like AWS Bedrock and Vertex AI. The category exists because running a large model efficiently at low latency and high reliability is a genuinely hard infrastructure problem, distinct from training one — an open-weight model like Llama 4 or DeepSeek V3 can be hosted by a dozen different providers at different prices and speeds, even though the underlying weights are identical. Choosing an inference provider in 2026 usually comes down to price per token, latency, and which specific open models each one supports well.