# Grab AI Gateway: Connecting Grabbers to multiple GenAI providers

[Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab) · Bjorn Jee · Feb 19, 2025

## Summary

Grab built the AI Gateway to centralize access, cost control, and security across external and open-source Generative AI providers such as OpenAI, Azure, AWS, and Google. Designed as a set of lightweight reverse proxies, the gateway manages authentication, rate limiting, and authorization while translating payloads into a unified OpenAI-compatible interface. The platform archives request metadata and calculated per-call costs into a central data lake for auditing and showback, dynamically routing traffic across shared reserved capacity and regions to mitigate quota throttling. Supporting over 300 internal use cases, the system integrates directly with internal development notebooks and deployment tools to power applications ranging from real-time audio safety analysis to automated content moderation.

## Takeaways

- A unified API interface maps external model endpoints to the OpenAI schema, allowing developers to switch providers or configure fallback routing simply by modifying the model parameter.
- The gateway minimizes idle reserved instance costs and circumvents regional rate limits by pooling reserved capacity and dynamically load balancing requests across regions and equivalent models.
- Access management utilizes automated Slack-issued exploration keys for rapid prototyping in staging environments, while production services require mini-RFC compliance reviews and dedicated service keys.

**Tags:** [Architecture](https://yomu.fyi/topic/architecture), [Authentication](https://yomu.fyi/topic/authentication), [LLMs](https://yomu.fyi/topic/llm), [Machine Learning](https://yomu.fyi/topic/machine-learning)

[Read original post](https://engineering.grab.com/grab-ai-gateway)