Traffic to hidden services stays within the tor network so you don't need exit nodes. However it isn't necessarily faster. As I understand it, with a typical hidden service, the hidden service nominates certain nodes for clients to use to make contact with it and the client and the service build tor circuits to those nodes thereby preserving the privacy of both clients and servers but you end up with longer circuits than those to exit nodes, and you are limited by the slowest node in that chain. There is a mode for hidden services where you don't care about staying hidden (say you are twitter or the NYT running a service and everyone already knows who owns the site and where the datacenters are) where, as I understand it, you allow clients to build circuits directly to you which preserves client privacy but not server. This is more performant than a normal hidden service but I wouldn't call it fast.