The United States of Inference: 50 AI inference providers, mapped

Alabama → Moonshot AI: Huntsville engineers designed the Saturn V that carried Americans to the moon, which makes Rocket City the obvious home for a lab named after the trip. Beijing lab behind Kimi and the open-weight Kimi K models.

Alaska → Crusoe: Alaska is oil rigs and off-grid cabins at the end of the road, and Crusoe got its start running GPUs on gas that oil wells used to burn off. Vertically integrated AI cloud, from energy to managed inference.

Arizona → General Compute: The desert once known for cactus now builds chip fabs, and General Compute runs inference on custom ASICs with no GPU in sight. Inference cloud running on ASICs instead of GPUs.

Arkansas → DeepInfra: Walmart started in Arkansas on the promise of everyday low prices, and DeepInfra brings that energy to open models with a giant catalog and no minimums. Low-cost serverless API for open-source models.

California → OpenAI: Most of what feels normal today got tried in California first. ChatGPT is how most of the world met AI. Frontier lab behind the GPT models, ChatGPT and the OpenAI API.

Colorado → Baseten: Every fourteener climb starts at base camp, and so does a lot of AI headed for production. Inference platform for serving open-source and custom models.

Connecticut → Together AI: Hartford got rich getting everyone to pool their risk. Together started out as a decentralized cloud pooling GPUs. AI native cloud for open-model inference, fine-tuning and GPUs.

Delaware → Modal: Over a million companies call Delaware home without ever setting foot there. Modal runs your code on GPUs without you ever setting foot on a server. Serverless GPU cloud for running AI inference and sandboxes.

Florida → Meta: Nobody can predict Florida Man or Meta: Llama one year, Muse the next, a retired API in between. Your grandma probably thinks Muse is cute. Meta Superintelligence Labs serving Muse models; maker of Llama.

Georgia → OpenRouter: Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson is the busiest airport in the country, and OpenRouter is where the AI industry changes planes. Unified API routing requests across hundreds of LLMs.

Hawaii → Dolphin: Hawaii’s spinner dolphins swim wherever they want. Dolphin’s models say whatever they want, running on home GPUs scattered across a network. Uncensored Dolphin models served on a network of distributed consumer GPUs.

Idaho → Makora: Boise is home to Micron, which makes the memory stacked inside today’s GPUs. Makora’s agents rewrite the code running on those GPUs until it’s up to 5x faster. Inference endpoints tuned by AI agents, down to the GPU kernels.

Illinois → Vercel AI Gateway: Every trip across America seems to connect through O’Hare. Every model call can connect through Vercel. Vercel's single API gateway to hundreds of AI models.

Indiana → Groq: Built for tight, predictable latency, Groq belongs at the Indy 500, where the winning car holds its line for 500 miles. Inference neocloud built on LPU and NVIDIA hardware.

Iowa → Wafer: Iowa farmers brag about bushels per acre, and Wafer brags about tokens per second on the same weights everyone else runs. Fast inference for open models.

Kansas → Inception: A Kansas tornado turns a whole farm into noise in seconds. Mercury runs it in reverse: noise in, a whole answer out. Diffusion LLMs (Mercury) generating tokens in parallel.

Kentucky → CoreWeave: Fort Knox guards the nation’s gold reserve, and CoreWeave guards the GPU reserve the biggest AI labs rent from. AI cloud built on NVIDIA GPU clusters, with open-model serving through W&B Inference.

Louisiana → Mistral: Louisiana still speaks a little French, and so does Europe’s frontier lab. Paris lab building open-weight models and sovereign AI infrastructure.

Maine → Thinking Machines: Mainers fix their own boats, plows and roofs. Thinking Machines built Tinker so you can fix up your own model without touching a GPU. Mira Murati’s research lab; Tinker API for fine-tuning and serving open models.

Maryland → Cloudflare Workers AI: The NSA lives in Maryland. So does the company that sits in front of a big chunk of the internet. Serverless GPU inference on Cloudflare's global edge network.

Massachusetts → Subconscious: Home of the oldest modern marathon, the Boston Marathon. Subconscious builds Marathon models that keep agents going for hours. Inference for long-running agents with 200k+ token sessions.

Michigan → Morph: Michigan gave the world the moving assembly line, where each specialist does one job at blistering speed, and Morph applies that idea to code edits. Fast Apply code-edit models and inference for coding agents.

Minnesota → Cohere: Minnesota is where Target, 3M and General Mills keep their headquarters, a polite drive from Canada. Cohere is the Toronto lab that builds AI for companies exactly like them. Enterprise and sovereign AI models (Command) and the North platform.

Mississippi → StepFun: The Ole Miss Rebels love picking fights with bigger SEC programs. StepFun is a startup picking fights with China’s tech giants. Shanghai lab building the Step family of foundation models.

Missouri → Infron: St. Louis has the Gateway to the West. Infron is a gateway to 400+ models. Unified API gateway to hundreds of AI models.

Montana → Armada: Montana has ranches a hundred miles from the nearest data center. Armada ships the data center to the ranch. Containerized edge data centers for AI where data is generated.

Nebraska → Parasail: Warren Buffett got rich in Omaha buying what everyone else overlooked, and Parasail turns overlooked GPU capacity into cheap batch inference. Pay-per-token inference cloud for open models.

Nevada → Venice: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and Venice runs uncensored models without keeping your conversations. Private, uncensored AI platform on open-source models.

New Hampshire → Refuseless: New Hampshire stamps Live Free or Die on every license plate, and Refuseless builds models that follow the motto. API for uncensored, abliterated open models.

New Jersey → ElevenLabs: Edison recorded the first human voice in Menlo Park. ElevenLabs can now fake yours. Voice AI: text-to-speech, speech-to-text and voice agents.

New Mexico → fal: Santa Fe is one of the biggest art markets in the country and Albuquerque keeps film crews busy, a fitting home for fal and its thousand-plus generative media models. Inference platform for generative media: image, video and audio models.

New York → Anthropic: New York is the business capital of the world, plus millions of regular people upstate. Anthropic dominates enterprise AI and still serves millions of individuals with Claude. AI safety lab building the Claude model family.

North Carolina → SambaNova: NASCAR country loves heavy machines moving at absurd speed, and SambaNova pushes giant open models fast on its own dataflow chips. Fast inference on custom RDU chips.

North Dakota → Boundless: The prairie runs to the horizon in every direction, and Boundless tunes reserved capacity so you never hit the edge. Reserved, tuned inference capacity for open models.

Ohio → RunInfra: The Wright brothers tested 200 wing designs in their Dayton bike shop before they ever left the ground. RunInfra tests your serving setup before it ships. Agent that benchmarks and deploys open-model inference stacks.

Oklahoma → Particle.AI: Oklahoma City invented the shopping cart so you could haul more for less effort. Particle hauls a million tokens for a quarter. Low-cost inference for open-weight models with 1M-token context.

Oregon → Hugging Face: Portland’s motto is Keep Portland Weird, and Hugging Face is the open-source town square where AI’s weirdest projects live. Open-source model hub with routed inference providers.

Pennsylvania → Fireworks AI: Philadelphia lit up the first Fourth of July with fireworks in 1777. They’ve been the main event ever since. Inference and fine-tuning platform for open models.

Rhode Island → Sail Research: Newport is America’s sailing capital, and Sail lets you pick a completion window and pay up to 85% less for waiting on the wind. Open-model API with completion windows that trade latency for lower prices.

South Carolina → Relace: South Carolina’s beaches exist for relaxing, and Relace keeps inference cheap enough that you can. Open-model inference and apply models for coding agents.

South Dakota → Luminal: Mount Rushmore carved four presidents straight into granite, and Luminal compiles models straight into native GPU code. ML compiler that turns models into optimized native GPU and ASIC code.

Tennessee → Suno: Nashville has a songwriter on every barstool. Suno has one in every browser tab. AI music generation from text prompts.

Texas → xAI: Everything is bigger in Texas, opinions included, and xAI is the lab that does things its own way and dares you to object. AI lab behind the Grok models, now part of SpaceX.

Utah → Cerebras: Land speed records get set on the Bonneville Salt Flats, and Cerebras posts the fastest published output speed of any public host. Wafer-scale chips powering very fast inference.

Vermont → GMI Cloud: Vermonters grow their own food and fix their own trucks. GMI Cloud owns the GPUs it runs on. GPU cloud offering serverless inference and dedicated clusters.

Virginia → Amazon Bedrock: Virginia is for lovers. It’s also for defense contractors and US-East-1. Amazon Bedrock embodies this great state. AWS managed service for foundation models and agents.

Washington → Google: Seattle grows tech giants the way it grows moss. Google wrote the Transformer paper that every model on this map is built on. Google's Gemini API and Vertex AI model serving.

West Virginia → TypeSafe AI: Jevons noticed that making coal cheaper to burn only made the world burn more of it, and West Virginia dug plenty. TypeSafe named its first model Jev, making the same bet on decisions. Decision models for software that report calibrated confidence.

Wisconsin → Nebius: Wisconsin was built by European immigrants who showed up and got to work, and Nebius is the Amsterdam neocloud doing the same in American AI. Full-stack AI cloud with GPU clusters and Token Factory inference.

Wyoming → Inference.net: With the smallest population in the country, Wyoming has room to spare, and Inference.net runs batch jobs on spare GPU capacity. Inference infrastructure and custom model training for AI-native teams.