groq vs xai — AI API latency comparison

Last verified October 22, 2026

As of October 22, 2026, groq and xai are evenly matched on edge latency — each is faster in 2 of 4 measured region(s). From Asia (Tokyo), groq leads at 168 ms vs 170 ms p50.

Is groq or xai faster in each region?

Full details: groq by region · xai by region.

Does the answer change by region?

The answer flips depending on where you measure from. In Asia (Tokyo) the gap is widest at 2 ms, while in South America (São Paulo) it narrows to 0 ms — and the faster provider is not the same one in every region.

This is why a single-location benchmark cannot answer “is groq or xai faster” for you. Pick the row that matches where your requests originate.

Does groq or xai have better uptime?

Over the last 24 hours groq and xai are level on availability at 100% of probes succeeding across 4 region(s). Neither is separated from the other by uptime at this sample size.

Availability observed by our probes over the last 24 hours, not a contractual SLA. Providers publish their own SLA terms and their own status pages; this is an outside view of whether requests actually completed, which is the number a status page cannot give you about your own region. The worst region is shown next to the average because an average hides the one place where a share of your users sees a different service. Longer windows and all 4 regions: uptime comparison · confirmed outages: incidents.

What exactly is being compared?

Both providers are measured the same way, from the same probes, on the same schedule: a real connection is opened to each provider’s own API host and DNS, TCP, TLS and the first response byte are timed. Neither is measured through a gateway or aggregator, so the numbers reflect each provider’s own infrastructure. Figures are p50 and p95 over the last 24 hours; percentiles are nearest-rank, because a handful of outliers would distort an average.

What this comparison does not cover

This is edge latency — the time before the model starts working. It is the floor you pay on every request regardless of which model you call, and it is the part you cannot optimise away with a better prompt. It is not time-to-first-token, throughput, price or answer quality: those depend on the specific model, and comparing them across providers running different models would not be like-for-like. Measured time to first token (TTFT), with the model named next to every figure and the network share broken out, is on the time to first token page.

Method in full: methodology · Raw numbers under CC BY 4.0: JSON API · No provider pays for placement.