xAI's Grok models land in the Vercel ecosystem

Vercel and xAI have announced a partnership that puts Grok models directly into the Vercel developer workflow. Through the Vercel Marketplace, developers can access xAI's conversational models without needing a separate xAI account. xAI is also introducing a free tier via Vercel to support quick prototyping and experimentation.

The integration extends to Vercel's official Next.js AI chatbot template, which now runs on Grok models through the AI SDK. An integration with the v0 development tool is also planned, though not yet available.

What the Marketplace integration provides

  • A free plan from xAI, with no extra signup required through the Marketplace
  • Direct access to Grok LLMs from Vercel projects
  • Simplified authentication and API key management, handled through automatically configured environment variables
  • Integrated billing through Vercel, so you pay only for actual usage

For developers already working in a Vercel project, the xAI provider can be installed directly from the CLI:

vercel install xai

Building with the AI SDK and the chatbot template

The Next.js AI Chatbot is a free, open-source template built by the teams behind Next.js, AI SDK, and shadcn/ui. It includes examples of tool calling, retrieval, code execution, artifacts, and genUI — the foundational UI components for building a custom ChatGPT or grok.com-style application.

The AI SDK itself is a free, open-source library that provides a unified API for integrating with virtually any language model. This means you can switch between models and providers with just a change of one or two lines of code. The SDK also includes a playground that lets you compare outputs from different providers. xAI is the default provider there, allowing side-by-side evaluation of Grok models against offerings from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others.

import { xai } from "@ai-sdk/xai";
import { streamtext } from "ai";
const result = streamText({
  model: xai("grok-2-1212"),
  prompt: "What is the meaning of life?",
});
for await (const textPart of result.textStream) {
  process.stdout.write(textPart); // The answer is 42.
}

What's on the roadmap

The next step for the partnership is integrating the xAI Marketplace offering into v0's chat interface. This would follow the pattern already established for Vercel Marketplace storage integrations. Vercel also says more AI provider integrations are planned for the Marketplace in the near future; service providers interested in participating can contact [email protected].

With Grok now available as a Marketplace option, developers have an additional path for building AI-powered applications on Vercel — whether they're adding a conversational model to a chatbot, testing new agent workflows, or scaling existing AI workloads.