Revolut cuts AI coding costs by about 90% with self-hosted models

The British fintech swapped commercial coding assistants for open-weight models from Z.ai running on its own Nvidia hardware Revolut has found a way to give its engineers more AI while spending far less on it. The British fintech says it cut its AI coding inference costs by roughly 90 percent in less than a year. The trick was not a better vendor contract. Revolut made self-hosted, open-weight models its default and moved away from leaning mainly on commercial services like Anthropic’s Claude. From rationed tokens to an open tab David Abitbol, ops and infrastructure lead at Revolut, walked through the numbers at the AI Engineer conference in New York last month. The company rolled AI coding tools out to roughly 2,000 engineers. After that rollout, Revolut measured a 60 percent improvement in coding time and a 70 percent improvement in lead time. Lead time tracks how long work takes to move from start to delivery, so the gain shows up beyond the keyboard. The models doing the heavy lifting come from Z.ai, a Chinese AI lab. Revolut began deploying Z.ai’s GLM-5.1 model in April 2026 and later moved on to GLM-5.3. That newer model now runs on 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs inside Revolut’s own se...