Artificial Intelligence1 min read

How OpenRouter observes, understands, and acts on 740 million LLM requests a day with ClickHouse Cloud

By · Published by Everything Blog

In short

OpenRouter acts as an intermediary connecting developers to over 80 inference providers, managing traffic across more than 500 artificial intelligence models. The platform processes high-throughput telemetry using tools like GCP Pub/Sub, ClickPipes, and dbt to maintain health metrics and public rankings. Incoming request data is continuously fed back into the engine to optimize routing choices according to developer constraints around latency, throughput, and pricing.

Key points

  • Real-time telemetry rollups enable automated failovers and inform routing algorithms base…: Real-time telemetry rollups enable automated failovers and inform routing algorithms based on cost, quality, and latency preferences.
  • Materialized views and orchestration tools power developer analytics, public model leader…: Materialized views and orchestration tools power developer analytics, public model leaderboards, and endpoint monitoring.
  • The centralized telemetry loop drives third-party tools like TypeSafe AI’s Jev Router to…: The centralized telemetry loop drives third-party tools like TypeSafe AI’s Jev Router to direct traffic using live usage patterns.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

Summary

- OpenRouter uses ClickHouse Cloud as the single store behind customer analytics, public model rankings, internal AI agents, and routing across 500+ models.

- Since OpenRouter adopted ClickHouse, monthly requests have grown 33x to 19.7 billion, with 110+ trillion tokens served per week.

- Every request feeds back into ClickHouse for continuous routing evaluation; that same data now powers a Jev Router, from TypeSafe AI, that picks models based on real-world usage.

If you ask a developer which LLM they’re using, they’ll often say “it depends.” It might be a frontier model for code review, a cheaper model for summarizing support tickets, or a similar model from a different provider.

OpenRouter sits between developers and inference providers, handling some over 1 billion requests every day. It offers a single interface to more than 500 models across over 80 providers, routing each request to the endpoint (a combination of model and provider) that best fits the user’s preferences, whether that’s price, quality, latency, or throughput.

It also handles failover, falling back to another endpoint if one runs into trouble, and…

Artificial Intelligence