Cerebras is the clear raw-speed leader of 2026 — 3,115 tokens/s, 1.8× the next provider
Asked:
“fastest inference providers 2026”
The evidence covers 11 inference providers’ fastest observed 2026 results, gathered from independent benchmarks across many hosts, plus one controlled head-to-head of 5 providers on Meta Llama 3.3 70B Instruct run 2026-09-02. Speed is generated output tokens per second (higher is better); TTFT is seconds to first token (lower is better). The controlled comparison is single-sourced from LLMPodium.
Fastest observed endpoint per provider
Caveat: each bar is a different model, prompt size, region, date and benchmark method — this ranks each provider’s fastest observed endpoint, not an apples-to-apples contest. Hover a bar for methodology and source.
Controlled head-to-head: Llama 3.3 70B Instruct
Identical workload — 1,000 input / 500 output tokens, 50 concurrent clients, 10,000 requests per provider, streaming from AWS us-east-1, 2026-09-02. Single-sourced from LLMPodium. Left: output speed. Right: time to first token.
Listed prices per million tokens in that test: Cerebras $0.60 in / $0.60 out · Groq $0.59 in / $0.79 out · Fireworks AI $0.90 in / $0.90 out · Together AI $0.88 in / $0.88 out · DeepInfra $0.23 in / $0.40 out. Source: llmpodium.com
Buyer guide
- Choose Cerebras for maximum raw speed — it led both the broad snapshot and the controlled Llama test, at $0.60 in / $0.60 out per million tokens.
- Consider Groq for very low latency and broad fast serving across many models.
- Benchmark your exact model, region, context length, concurrency and reasoning setting before committing — rankings shift with all of them.
- Cross-model peak speed says nothing about model quality; it measures serving infrastructure only.
All broad-snapshot rows
One row per provider: fastest observed model, speed, TTFT, method and source. The “Artificial Analysis” row is excluded from the chart above (a benchmark-publisher labeling artifact for Celeris-1) but kept here.
| Provider | Fastest model observed | Tokens/s | TTFT s | Date | Method | Source |
|---|
Method: 12 broad-snapshot rows (one per normalized provider; fastest observed hosted endpoint, 2025–2026 benchmarks across 31+ independent hosts, no single URL backing more than half the rows) plus 6 standardized rows from LLMPodium measured 2026-09-02. Output speed is generated tokens per second; TTFT is seconds to first token or first answer token as each benchmark defines it. The “Artificial Analysis” row and the OpenRouter DeepSeek V3 row are excluded from charts as noted; methodology text is truncated on screen and shown in full on hover.