A Bank Cuts Its AI Bill by About 90% by Running AI on Its Own Computers

For thirteen weeks we have asked who pays for the AI tools used in shipping offices. This week a large company gave a clear answer to a related question: what happens if you stop renting AI and run it yourself?

What Revolut did. Revolut, the European digital bank, moved about 2,000 engineers from paid coding assistants, Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, to an open model called GLM 5.3. An open model is one anyone can download and run on their own computers. This one is made by the Chinese company Z.ai. Revolut runs it on 56 Nvidia chips in its own setup. It says its AI coding costs fell by about 90% in less than a year, to about 30 US cents per million tokens (a token is a small piece of text, roughly three quarters of a word). It also says coding time improved by 60%. The paid tools are still available, but only for hard jobs.

The honest limits. The 30-cent figure leaves out cloud costs, staff and monitoring. One outside analysis says the real saving is smaller than ten times, and the comparison mixes two different years of use. The model works with text only, so jobs with images still go to paid services. Revolut also had to tune it heavily. And the productivity figures are Revolut's own.

Why this matters at sea. We have written for weeks about AI on board when the satellite link is down. A ship cannot rent AI from a data centre it cannot reach. Revolut shows that a company can run a strong open model on its own hardware, at scale, for daily work. A ship is much smaller than a bank, and a ship's computer is much smaller than 56 chips. But smaller open models are improving fast, and the idea is the same: AI that lives where the work is.

What to ask. For your office: which AI tasks are simple and repeated enough to run on a cheaper open model? For your ship suppliers: does your AI work with no link, on hardware on board, and what does it need?

Disclosure: we use Claude, made by Anthropic, to help produce this newsletter. Revolut moved most of its coding work away from Claude. [Cybernews · AI Chat Daily · AiatSea, 25 October]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 8 November 2026.