Shopify, Roblox, Spotify, and other tech giants just presented their latest AI bills during first-quarter earnings calls. AI has helped them freeze or even shrink headcount, but soaring investments in AI chips and unpredictable token consumption are eating away those labor savings — and starting to squeeze gross margins.
Roblox is feeling the pain most acutely. The company has already trimmed its full-year profit forecast. To help creators build games faster, Roblox has deployed over 400 AI models that handle more than 1.5 million inferences per second. The compute bill is so enormous that the company announced it will start charging developers directly for high-compute AI tools.
Shopify is in a similar bind. Its AI assistant for merchants has cut customer service labor costs, but the skyrocketing fees from large language model calls have swallowed that money back up. Spotify has said that while its overall headcount is shrinking, its per-employee compute spend on AI coding tools like Claude Code and Codex is climbing.
The math of swapping compute for humans doesn't always add up. Even Pinterest, which fully embraced AI and cut 15 percent of its staff this January to restructure, warned in its earnings report that heavy investment in AI chips will continue to pressure gross margins for the rest of the year.