Definition
An MCP gateway (or MCP proxy) is a single Model Context Protocol server that fronts multiple upstream MCP servers, exposing a consolidated tool surface to AI agents while running each upstream server only once.
In Depth
Without a gateway, every AI assistant that uses MCP (Claude Desktop, Cursor, opencode, VS Code) starts its own copy of every MCP server it needs. An r/opencodeCLI thread documented 35 npm processes and 4 GB of RAM serving the same MCP fleet across three agents. A gateway solves this by running one daemon that exposes a single endpoint; each agent connects to that endpoint instead of spawning its own copies. The schema-load saving is the second win — many MCP servers expose 8-15 tools with verbose schemas, and the gateway can compress, filter, or summarize tool descriptions so agents don't pay the full token cost on every session.
Example Usage
The team set up an MCP gateway as a single HTTP daemon and pointed Claude, Cursor, and opencode at it; process count dropped from 35 to 1, and schema-load tokens per session dropped from ~50,000 to under 500.
Platforms
MCP Gateway is relevant across the following platforms, all accessible through Scavio's unified API:
Related Terms
MCP Routing Decision
An MCP routing decision is the branch an agent makes when it has multiple MCP servers connected and must choose one (or ...
Agent Architecture
Agent architecture is the set of design choices that turn an LLM prompt into a production system: routing and classifica...
Context Bloat
Context bloat is the accumulation of tokens in an LLM's context window before the user has asked anything — usually from...