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Klarna has claimed that AI-related savings have allowed the buy now, pay later company to increase staff salaries by nearly 60%, but hinted it could slash more jobs after nearly halving its workforce over the past three years.

Chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski said headcount had dropped from 5,527 to 2,907 since 2022, mostly as a result of natural attrition, with departing staff replaced by technology rather than by new staff members.

The figures add to the impact of an internal artificial intelligence programme, which had steadily reduced its use of outsourced workers including those in customer service, with technology now carrying out the work of 853 full-time staff, up from 700 earlier this year.

It meant the company, which was founded in Sweden in 2005, had managed to increase revenues by 108% while keeping operating costs flat. Siemiatkowski told analysts on an earnings call on Tuesday that it was “pretty remarkable, and unheard of as a number, among businesses”.

He explained that Klarna has not hired “for a few years”. However, some of the resulting cost-savings had been used to increase pay for remaining staff, with average compensation – including employee-related taxes and pension contributions – rising by 60% over the past three years.

“We have made a commitment to our employees that all of these efficiency gains, and especially the applications of AI, should also, to some degree, come back in their pay cheques so that they are fully … incentivised [and] aligned with the investors, to drive these changes through the company.”

Average compensation for each employee has jumped from $126,000 (£96,000) in 2022 to $203,000 today, Klarna said.

Siemiatkowski, who is a shareholder in a number of AI firms including OpenAI and Perplexity through his family investment firm Flat Capital, said he hoped to continue increasing a metric measuring revenue per employee, suggesting a further reduction in staff numbers in the years ahead.

“We’re now at $1.1m per employee, and we hope to continue to do that acceleration.”

Siemiatkowski warned this week against costly investments in datacentres to power AI, telling the Financial Times that he expected the technology would become more efficient over time.

The comments came as Klarna reported a 26% jump in revenues in the three months to the end of September to $903m, beating analysts’ expectations of $882m.

But the Swedish business reported a $95m loss over the period, significantly higher than the $4m loss last year. Klarna said this was primarily driven by changes to accounting standards that it had to follow in the US, after its decision to list its shares on the New York stock exchange in September.

The announcement underscores AI industry’s insatiable appetite for computing power as companies race to build systems that can rival or surpass human intelligence.

Microsoft and Nvidia plan to invest in Anthropic under a new tie-up that includes a $30bn commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft’s cloud services, the latest high-profile deal binding together major players in the AI industry.

Nvidia will commit up to $10bn to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5bn, the companies said on Tuesday, without sharing more details.

A person familiar with the matter said both the companies have committed to investing in Anthropic’s next funding round.

The announcement underscores the AI industry’s insatiable appetite for computing power as companies race to build systems that can rival or surpass human intelligence. It also ties major OpenAI-backer Microsoft, as well as key AI chip supplier Nvidia, closer to one of the ChatGPT maker’s biggest rivals.

“We’re increasingly going to be customers of each other. We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure and we’ll go to market together,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video. He added that OpenAI “remains a critical partner”.

The move comes weeks after OpenAI unveiled a sweeping restructuring that moved it further away from its non-profit roots, giving it greater operational and financial freedom.

The startup has since then announced a $38bn deal to buy cloud services from Amazon.com as it reduces reliance on Microsoft. Its CEO, Sam Altman, has said OpenAI is committed to spending $1.4 trillion to develop 30 gigawatts of computing resources – enough to roughly power 25 million US homes.

Still, three years after ChatGPT’s debut, investors are increasingly uneasy that the AI boom has outrun fundamentals. Some business leaders have noted that circular deals – in which one partner props up another’s revenue – add to the bubble risk.

“The main feature of the partnership is to reduce the AI economy’s reliance on OpenAI,” D A Davidson analyst Gil Luria said of Tuesday’s announcement.

“Microsoft has decided not to rely on one frontier model company. Nvidia was also somewhat dependent on OpenAI’s success and is now helping generating broader demand.

AI industry consolidating

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff, Anthropic was recently valued at $183bn and has become a major rival to the ChatGPT maker, driven by the strong adoption of its services by enterprise customers.

The Reuters news agency reported last month that Anthropic was projecting to more than double and potentially nearly triple its annualised revenue run rate to around $26bn next year. It has more than 300,000 business and enterprise customers.

As part of Tuesday’s move, Anthropic will work with Nvidia on chips and models to improve performance and commit up to 1 gigawatt of compute using Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin hardware. Industry executives estimate that one gigawatt of AI computing can cost between $20bn and $25bn.

Microsoft will also give Azure AI Foundry customers access to the latest Claude models, making Claude the only frontier model offered across all three major cloud providers.

“These investments reflect how the AI industry is consolidating around a few key players,” eMarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said.

Despite the looming deal, Microsoft shares are down 3.2 percent in midday trading. Nvidia is also trading 1.9 percent lower than at the market open, and Amazon has fallen 4 percent. Tech stocks remain under pressure after a cloud services outage earlier on Tuesday. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is publicly traded.