Short answer
Cloudflare AI Gateway is one control point between your apps and the AI providers they call: retries, caching, rate limits, logs and spend.
In detail: What Is Cloudflare AI Gateway
Without a gateway, each application talks to each AI provider directly, and nobody has a full picture of usage, failures or cost.
What AI Gateway adds:
- Routing, retries and fallback: if a provider is slow or fails, the request is retried or sent to another provider, so the application keeps working.
- Caching: repeat questions are answered from cache, which is faster and avoids paying twice for the same answer.
- Rate limiting: caps requests in a period, protecting the app from spikes and misuse and keeping costs predictable.
- Analytics and logs: a record of every request, its performance and what was asked.
- Central cost management: one view of spend across all AI providers.
FirstNet deploys and runs AI Gateway as part of its Secure AI with Cloudflare service, alongside data protection for the same applications.