Baseten vs OpenRouter: Inference & serving clouds compared

November 2026 edition · assessment by Frontier Tech Intelligence

Baseten ranks 94 on the AI Infra 100 with a score of 80; OpenRouter ranks 96 with 76. Baseten is ahead on commercials and firepower. Level on deployment, production, progress, technology, positioning and leverage. Baseten is based in San Francisco, United States, OpenRouter in United States. Baseten is named in 23 signals and OpenRouter in 80.

Baseten →

San Francisco, California, United States · AI Core · Compute software / Inference & serving clouds · baseten.co

Baseten provides hosted infrastructure for deploying and serving AI models, including open-weight large language models and NVIDIA-optimized inference workloads.

AI Infra 100 · rank 94 · score 80

Scores, AI Core (of 10)

Deployment8
Production10
Commercials8
Progress10
Technology6
Positioning6
Firepower10
Leverage8

Darker bar: ahead of the other company on that measure.

Positioning

Inference-serving platform that runs customers' models on rented GPU capacity across clouds; software layer, no owned silicon or sites.

Latest signals

  • Baseten targets a $30 billion valuationTech in Asia
  • OpenAI launched a Marketplace for enterprise commitments and partner models.The Innermost Loop
  • Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 entered OpenAI’s enterprise Codex channel and billing system through Baseten.TechNode

23 signals name Baseten.

Facts, with sources

  • Base Labs launches an open-weight AI safety partnership with Hugging Face and Goodfiretechcrunch.com — 2026-09-17
  • NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra became available through six hosted AI platformsNVIDIA blogs
  • Annualized revenue grew approximately 3x in a quarterTechTimes

9 facts on file.

OpenRouter →

United States · AI Core · Compute software / Inference & serving clouds · openrouter.ai

OpenRouter operates a model gateway that provides API access to more than 400 AI models and processes over 10 trillion tokens per day. It monetizes this inference access through prepaid credits and usage charges.

AI Infra 100 · rank 96 · score 76

Scores, AI Core (of 10)

Deployment8
Production10
Commercials6
Progress10
Technology6
Positioning6
Firepower8
Leverage8

Darker bar: ahead of the other company on that measure.

Positioning

Model-routing gateway that fronts most open and closed model APIs and publishes the token-share data the industry quotes; being acquired by Stripe.

Latest signals

  • Space Bunny reached the top daily token-call ranking on OpenRouter and OpenCode within three days of launch.36Kr newsflashes
  • Chinese AI models led global weekly usage for the 24th consecutive week.Yicai
  • OpenRouter’s monthly token processing volume exceeded 100 trillion in July 2026.Caixin

80 signals name OpenRouter.

Facts, with sources

  • Stripe acquired OpenRoutera16z — 2026-09-09
  • Tencent Hunyuan Hy4 preview open-sourced with a 1,000,000-token context windowTechNode
  • Stripe reportedly acquired OpenRouter for more than $7 billionTechCrunch

20 facts on file.

More comparisons

Questions this page answers

Baseten or OpenRouter: which is ahead in ai core?

Baseten ranks 94 on the AI Infra 100 with a score of 80; OpenRouter ranks 96 with 76. Baseten is ahead on commercials and firepower. Level on deployment, production, progress, technology, positioning and leverage. Baseten is based in San Francisco, United States, OpenRouter in United States. Baseten is named in 23 signals and OpenRouter in 80.

How do Baseten and OpenRouter compare?

Baseten ranks 94 on the AI Infra 100 with a score of 80; OpenRouter ranks 96 with 76. Baseten is ahead on commercials and firepower. Level on deployment, production, progress, technology, positioning and leverage. Baseten is based in San Francisco, United States, OpenRouter in United States. Baseten is named in 23 signals and OpenRouter in 80. Both company files carry the scores on eight measures, the facts with sources and the latest signals.

Every comparison here comes from the same files members use every day.

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