Revolut has replaced Claude Code and OpenAI Codex as the default coding tools for about 2,000 engineers with GLM, an open-weight model from China’s Z.ai that it runs on its own US infrastructure. The company says the change cut its AI coding bill to roughly one-tenth of its previous level. AI operations chief David Abitbol reported that engineers’ coding time fell by about 60% and the time from starting a task to merging it fell by 70%. GLM is served using around 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs, at an estimated blended cost of $0.30 per million tokens.
The switch followed an expensive, budget-limited Claude Code rollout that delivered only modest gains and encouraged engineers to ration AI use. Self-hosting GLM removes token limits, while Revolut keeps Claude Code and Codex available for the hardest tasks and sends image work to Gemini. Coding agents operate in sandboxes with approval rules and human oversight. The reported savings exclude cloud, staffing and monitoring costs, and the productivity improvements do not isolate the model change from other factors, including the removal of usage limits. Revolut also needed substantial tuning to make inference practical, reducing time to the first token from 14 seconds to 1.7 seconds. Its experience suggests lower-cost models can handle routine enterprise coding at scale, but may depend on infrastructure and expertise that smaller firms lack.
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