Latency leaderboard per provider, April 2026

Which AI provider has the lowest latency in April 2026? On the Requesty gateway xAI led p50 at 0.6 s, with Novita (0.8 s), Azure (1.0 s) and Mistral (1.4 s) close behind. Vertex (Claude) was the slowest at 13.7 s, 23× the fastest and 2.8× slower than Vertex (Gemini) at 4.9 s on the same Vertex route. Anthropic-direct sat mid-pack at 5.8 s with a 52.6 s p95 long tail.

Why it mattersTotal p50 latency is dominated by workload type, not pure provider speed. The 23× spread is partly silicon, partly streaming behaviour, but mostly the size and tool-call complexity of requests being sent. The Vertex-Claude tail is heavy agentic Claude Code traffic, not slow inference. Reading the leaderboard literally without that context will mislead any provider-selection decision.

Requesty (2026). Latency leaderboard per provider, April 2026. Requesty Data. https://requesty.ai/data/provider-latency-leaderboard-april-2026

@misc{requesty_provider_latency_leaderboard_april_2026,
  author       = {{Requesty}},
  title        = {Latency leaderboard per provider, April 2026},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://requesty.ai/data/provider-latency-leaderboard-april-2026}},
  note         = {Requesty Data}
}