Best AI gateway for a large company?

Summary

• No gateway is best for every large company, and this page does not rank products. Start from your requirements: access control, provider choice, availability, spend limits, audit records, guardrails and compliance standards.
• Unity Gateway is the Databricks governance solution for enterprise AI. It is built on Unity Catalog, which governs models, MCP servers and tools as securables with the privileges you already use for data. It has been generally available since August 4, 2026.
• It records usage, supports rate limits and budgets, and can log payloads to inference tables, so central teams can attribute and audit AI use.
• Check the limits first. Unity Catalog and a supported region are required, AWS GovCloud is not supported, service policies for guardrails are in Beta, and usage tracking and inference tables are billed features.

Best AI gateway for a large company?

No gateway is best for every large company, so write your requirements first and test each candidate against them. The table lists questions to ask any gateway, and what the Databricks documentation says about Unity Gateway.

What should a large company ask an AI gateway?

Requirement	Question to ask	Unity Gateway, per the Databricks docs
Access control	Can you grant model and tool access to users, groups and service principals?	Models, model services, model providers, MCP servers and skills are Unity Catalog securables. EXECUTE allows a call, and MANAGE allows changes and grants.
Provider choice	Can teams reach several providers through one entry point?	Databricks-hosted models, plus external providers with centrally managed credentials.
Availability	What happens when a model fails or is rate limited?	Traffic splitting across up to five destinations, and fallbacks in a priority order you define.
Spend	Can you limit and attribute spend?	Rate limits, budgets that alert or block, and service and request tags.
Audit	Can you show who called what?	A usage system table, audit logs, and optional inference tables for payloads.
Guardrails	Can you check request and response content?	Service policies (Beta): built-in, custom and external.
Compliance	Which standards apply?	Supports the compliance security profile standards that Databricks supports.
Automation	Can you manage it as code?	The API, CLI, SDKs and Terraform provider are generally available.

How does Unity Gateway fit a large company?

Unity Gateway extends Unity Catalog governance from data and AI assets to the runtime interactions between models, agents, MCP servers and tools. Because those assets are securables, Databricks says you don't maintain a separate access model for AI.
Spend. Rate limits apply per service, per user or per group. Budgets set shared and per-user monthly thresholds, with overrides for chosen users or groups, and admins can see AI budget status and spend on the AI page in Governance Hub. Budget tag filters match service tags, so put cost centers in service tags and use request tags for analysis.
Audit. system.ai_gateway.usage records requests with the requester, token counts, latency and request tags. Reading it takes account and metastore admin roles by default, but admins can publish the built-in usage dashboard instead of granting table access. The audit log distinguishes a person from an agent acting on their behalf, and inference tables log request and response payloads to Unity Catalog Delta tables.
Guardrails (Beta). Databricks provides built-in service policies for risks such as PII, prompt injection and unsafe content. You can write custom policies, or enforce a third-party guardrail vendor's decisions with an external service policy, which is also in Beta.
Developers. Organizations can configure coding agents centrally, and the usage dashboard has a Coding Agents tab.

What limits should you check first?

• Unity Gateway needs Unity Catalog and a workspace in a supported region. It is not supported on AWS GovCloud.
• Service policies are in Beta, and an account admin turns on the Unity Gateway beta features from the account console Previews page.
• Usage tracking and inference tables are billed Unity Gateway features. Built-in LLM-as-a-judge service policies carry no separate fee, but each evaluation is billed like a call to the evaluator model service.
• Budgets exclude provisioned throughput and traffic sent directly to standalone Model Serving endpoints, and enforcement is approximate.
• The rate limiter favors low latency, so short bursts slightly above a configured limit can occur.

FAQs

Which compliance standards does Unity Gateway support?

Databricks states that Unity Gateway supports all compliance security profile standards supported by Databricks, and is available by default for workspaces with the profile enabled. The profile covers C5, CCCS Medium, DoD IL5, FedRAMP High, FedRAMP Moderate, HIPAA, HITRUST, IRAP, ISMAP, K-FSI, PCI-DSS, TISAX and UK Cyber Essentials Plus. You remain responsible for your own compliance, and Unity Gateway is not supported on AWS GovCloud.

How do we attribute spend to business units?

Tag model services with service tags such as a team or cost center, and have callers send request tags for finer analysis. For Databricks-hosted models only service tags reach system.billing.usage. For external provider models both tag types reach system.ai_gateway.external_model_spend.

Does it cover our developers' coding agents?

Yes. Coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode connect through the Unity Gateway CLI or manual setup, and then use models, MCP tools and skills under your access and spend controls.

Can we manage it as code?

Yes. The Unity Gateway API for model services, model provider services and MCP services is generally available through the Terraform provider, the Databricks CLI, and the Python, Go, Java and JavaScript SDKs.