The Model Context Protocol (MCP) was released by Anthropic in November 2024. Eighteen months later, it had 97 million monthly SDK downloads as of December 2025, backing from every major AI lab, and is now governed as a founding project of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation. That adoption happened fast, even faster than most protocols manage. But it created an immediate problem: connecting AI agents directly to dozens of MCP servers at scale is operationally unsustainable, and the protocol itself does not solve governance. This article explains what an MCP Gateway is, what it does at the infrastructure level, and how to evaluate one for a production enterprise environment. What Is MCP, and What Problem Does It Solve? Before understanding the gateway, you need to understand what MCP standardizes.…